icholas Minor, the principal founder of the town,
General Braddock is found to have gone in another direction."

[Footnote 14: Mrs. A. H. Throckmorton in the Richmond _Times_.]

Leesburg is governed by a mayor and common council and had at the time
of the last government census (1900) a population of 1,513. An unusual
percentage of its people are well educated, and all proverbially
hospitable.

The houses, many of which are of brick and stone construction, are
built in a compact and substantial manner. In the town and its
environs are many of the most palatial residences to be seen in
Virginia. There are several well-kept public roads leading from the
town to the surrounding country seats and stock farms, nearly all of
which are modernized reminders of the old plantation days.

With an elevation less than most points in the County, Leesburg,
nevertheless, shares with them the distinction of being unsurpassed
for healthfulness and picturesqueness of surroundings.

Crossing at right angles, its streets are regular and spacious and
lighted by electricity. Many of its dwellings and business houses are
also equipped with electric lighting facilities, power for which is
generated at a plant located near Belmont, on Goose Creek, and
controlled by Leesburg capitalists. In almost every quarter of the
town are brick and granolithic sidewalks, fringed with the usual
varieties of shade trees.

Some of the municipal advantages not already enumerated are a sewerage
system, a fire department, a public library, police protection and a
thoroughly modern system of water-works of a capacity sufficient to
supply the entire corporation with absolutely pure water from a noted
spring issuing near the base of Catoctin Mountain.

Some of the public buildings are a town hall, one of the largest brick
edifices in Northern Virginia; a comparatively new court-house and a
clerk's office,[15] both venerable structures with imposing facades
lending them an exquisite air of Colonialism, the two liberally
disposed over a fenced area with sloping lawns and umbrageous shade; a
brick jail (County) containing eight steel cells, commodious
residential quarters for the jailer and his family and having, as an
humanitarian feature, a sunny court with towering walls; a remodelled
brick academy and a colored school, both comprising primary,
intermediate, and high school divisions, and provided with ample
educational facilities and extensive playgrounds.