David Martosko has been living in Burke for more than 20 years, and he never knew who the town was named after. Now that he’s found out the full story, he’s looking to get the name changed.
“Silas Burke is not somebody they tell you about when a realtor brings you to buy a house,” Martosko says. “He’s not on the travel brochure. I would bet 90 percent of the people that live here have never heard the name before.”
Now he’s looking to name the town Fenton — after one of the enslaved children Burke sold — and he’s holding a series of public hearings to give his neighbors their say. The first Fenton Project public meeting will be at 7:30 p.m. on March 27, at the Pohick Regional Library
Martosko does graphic design on a volunteer basis at Nova Labs, a makerspace in Fairfax, and says that last he was asked to make a poster for a Juneteenth picnic.
“I know what Juneteenth is, but I didn’t know anything about how people in Northern Virginia celebrate Juneteenth. And I thought it would be wise of me to find out so I didn’t make some sort of unforced error and look dumb,” he says.
About three hours later, he was down a research rabbit hole and came across the name of the landholder and slaveholder Silas Burke. “I always thought it was named after Edmund Burke, the English philosopher — I mean, that’s where my head was.”
He dove deeper into Silas Burke’s history, with the help of the Library of Virginia, the National Archives and the historic records collection at the old Fairfax courthouse. “I thought going into this that I was going to find he was an average antebellum Virginia farmer with 20 acres and a slave.”
That wouldn’t have surprised him, he says: Slavery is “the background radiation of Virginia,” Martosko says; “It’s always there, and it affects everything.” But that’s not what he found. “Everything I learned about him made it sound worse and worse and worse.”
‘Screaming from His Grave’
Silas Burke, a judge, not only owned up to 14 people at a time; he managed another slaveholding plantation, oversaw auctions of enslaved people that included women and children and on at least one occasion sold a boy away from his mother. In Martosko’s digging, he also found a tax record of a boy named Fenton; Martosko believes Burke owned him since age 6.
“This person is screaming from his grave, somehow, that you have to understand him. And the people [Burke] bought and sold and the people whose auction he ran, are screaming out to be heard. And I felt a compulsion to tell their story,” he says.
Burke is not an incorporated town, so the name change will go through the federal government. There’s a petition and a GoFundMe campaign on the Fenton Project website.
“I’m not an activist by nature,” Martosko says. “I’ve never engaged in something before where I’m trying to persuade a lot of people to do something that is not obvious or intuitive. So I’m taking a big leap here, I’m sticking my neck out in a way that’s very uncomfortable.”
Still, he says, “I decided I could not know what I knew and do nothing.”
Martosko says the responses he’s gotten to the idea run the range, and include thoughts from people “whose names you’d recognize both locally and nationally, politicians whose names you’d recognize nationally.”
“It almost feels to me like the people who set the tone of what the community is have been burying Silas a little bit,” Martosko says, “because either they’re ashamed of him, or they just don’t want the discussion to take place. I mean, in their shoes, I might very well feel the same thing. But I don’t think that’s OK.”
He says he’ll engage with anyone who expresses their opinion civilly — his email address is on his website, and he says he recently spoke with a descendant of Silas Burke (“I don’t think he was satisfied” afterward) — and looks to hold a series of public meetings on the topic.
Keeping Memory
When the first meeting starts, Martosko says, “The very first thing I’m going to do is talk for five minutes about what this is not. “This is not about trying to rename everything that’s got Burke on it. I don’t have any business telling people what their street name should be. I’m not going to tell a private business what to call their strip mall. I’m certainly not going to tell the church what to do.”
He’s also “not making a point of telling people that Silas Burke was an evil human being. There’s more to any person than that whatever you might find on Google, right?”
That said, “If we’re going to live in this town, and this man’s name is going to be on every piece of mail that comes to our houses, I think we should know about it. I would love to give my neighbors the opportunity to be as kind and thoughtful and conscientious as I already think they are.”
In a town that has Burke Road, Silas Burke Street, Silas Burke Park, Burke School, Burke Centre Parkway, Burke Centre, Burke Lake, and more, there’s no canceling Silas Burke. And Martosko says that’s not what he wants.
“There are all these things that are going to remain named Burke. And I think that’s a good thing. Because I think the juxtaposition of Silas and Fenton is what’s going to create the teachable moments. I really do want kids in the future to say, ‘Hey, Dad, we live in Fenton, Virginia, but everything around here is called Burke — what’s up with that?’ And I want the dad to say, ‘Oh, great question. Let me tell you.’”
Featured image courtesy David Martosko
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