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Toby’s Café is worth searching out, set back in a courtyard with a couple of boutiques. Pasta, soup and sandwiches on fresh baked French bread are the specialties. Dine inside or out on the patio courtyard where there is often live music on the weekends. Choose from more than two dozen flavors for your coffee or soda. (201 Union Street, tel. 703-494-1317)

Lodging

There’s no place to stay in town, but several major chain hotels operate in nearby Woodbridge. The closest is a Hampton Inn, about a mile away. (tel. 703-490-2300)

Information

The Prince William County Tourist Information Center is open daily, 9 am-5 pm, at 200 Mill Street; tel. 703-491-4045, www.occo­quan.com.

Prince William County/Manassas Conference and Visitors Bureau, tel. 800-432-1792, www.visitpwc.com.

Events

The Historic Occoquan Spring Arts and Craft Festival is in June, and a fall show takes place in late September (tel. 703-491-2168).

Christmas in Occoquan begins with Santa’s arrival by boat in late November (tel. 703-491-1736).

TRAVEL TIP: Be sure to pick up a Shopping & Dining Guide at the Visitors Center. Inside is a street map and self-guided haunted walking tour inside with great tidbits about the historic buildings. (tel. 703-491-1736)

Trip Journal: Gunston Hall

Dogwood may be the state tree (and flower), and azaleas may be the unofficial (and ubiquitous) flowering shrub, but to me, what really says “Virginia” is the scent of ancient boxwoods. There’s plenty of these at Gunston Hall, where George Mason planted the long row of boxwoods that very likely pre-date our nation.

Kept trimmed to only a few feet tall while Mason was alive, the shrubs now tower overhead and have overgrown a pathway that was once 12 feet wide. Walking through the now-narrow tunnel of greenery, the pungent, slightly sweet smell overwhelms. Take a minute to peer through the branches at the thick, gnarled, ancient trunks.

Archeologists are using soil sampling to unearth what Mason’s original Colonial gardens looked like and what else grew in them. According to journals kept by John Mason, his son, the elder Mason did his best thinking in these gardens. In good weather, he left his study several times a day to walk and meditate, and it was understood during these meditations no one should disturb him. It was likely here in these very gardens that founding father Mason mentally framed the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the first document in America that called for freedom of the press, religion, and the right to a trial by jury. Based on the writings of philosopher John Locke, it influenced the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.

Ironically, Mason’s slave quarters were probably visible just outside the gardens, a painful reminder of the contradiction that embodied people like Mason, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Inalienable rights did not apply to all residents of the fledgling nation.

Even while he wrote of slavery as a “slow poison,” an act of “Despotism & Cruelty,” and fought for the abolition of the slave trade in the Constitution, Mason was the second largest slave holder in Fairfax County (Washington was first). Neither is there any record that Mason ever freed any of his slaves. His writings reveal him to be painfully conflicted on the matter. While he wrote that the practice of slavery made men “callous to the Dictates of Humanity…to regard part of our own Species in the most abject & contemptible Degree below us,” he could devise no means of ending slavery that would preserve the prosperity of the plantations – and by association, his own large family of 12 children.

Roger Wilkins, author of Jefferson’s Pillow, has said it best: “The founding fathers led lives cushioned by slavery.” Yet it is refreshing to see lives of America’s early African-American inhabitants being interpreted in much more candid ways than ever before at places like Gunston Hall, where a new exhibit opened in 2002 with reconstructed slave quarters and outbuildings. Museum interpreters here, and at the museum homes of