member of the Interstate Commerce Commission. It then changed hands among various real estate investors and companies until 1967, when Wills & Van Metre, Inc. sold it to the Nature Conservancy, which was interested in the property because of two bald eagle nests discovered in 1965. It consolidated various parcels and in 1968 sold them to the Commonwealth of Virginia to become Mason Neck State Park, which opened in 1985. Archeologists investigated the Lexington site beginning around 2006. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2013, in part because of its landscape design unearthed during those excavations, which resembles that of Gunston Hall, as well as Marlborough, a now defunct Stafford County plantation once the home of John Mercer, George Mason's relative, guardian during his minority and mentor, and who died in 1768. References Houses in Fairfax County, Virginia Mason family residences Archaeological sites on the National Register of Historic Places in Virginia Plantations in Virginia National Register of Historic Places in Fairfax County, Virginia Burned houses in the United States