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A cleanup project behind a dumpster in a Vienna church parking lot uncovered an intimate link to families enslaved more than 250 years ago: handmade chimney bricks bearing fingerprints and the footprints of two children.

Scouts and families from Vienna’s Troop 1539 returned to the damp, overgrown site June 6 for their second workday of the spring. Led by Assistant Scoutmaster Thomas Remmers, they removed, cleaned, stacked and cataloged roughly two tons of remaining bricks from Moorefield, the 18th-century home of Jeremiah Moore.

The lower rows had sunk into the soft soil and needed to be dug out before they could be placed on pallets for town storage.

Moore’s 600-acre estate once extended across land between present-day Nottoway Park and the Vienna/Fairfax-GMU Metro station. His farmhouse was dismantled in 2017 after deteriorating severely.

Tyler McCarty, an Eagle Scout with Troop 1539, said the two-day service project became an emotional lesson in American history as the Scouts handled artifacts connected to slavery.

Others taking part included Vienna250 co-chairs Chuck Anderson and Tracy McCarty; Cynthia Griffiths, chief communications officer for Scouting America’s National Capital Area Council; and Andrew Yu of the Chinese Christian Church of Virginia. The church purchased the former Vienna Baptist Church property in December 2025.

The scattered pieces of Moorefield

Jeremiah Moore, who lived from 1746 to 1815, was a Revolutionary War veteran, farmer, slaveholder and itinerant Baptist evangelist. He also advocated for separating church and state.

Anderson said Moore was associated with Patrick Henry, who defended him after Moore was jailed for preaching without a license. Moore’s case and the surrounding religious-liberty movement also influenced George Mason, who drafted the Fairfax County Resolves in 1774 and later developed those principles in the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776.

The Town of Vienna acquired Moorefield in 1975. The property entered the Virginia Landmarks Register on Sept. 20, 1977, and the National Register of Historic Places on April 19, 1978.

After the house fell into serious disrepair, workers methodically dismantled it in 2017. It was later removed from both historic registers, and its components became scattered.

According to Anderson, the whereabouts of some materials had been unclear for more than two decades. A Vienna250 social media post showing old photographs of the supposedly lost house finally produced a lead.

A man responding to the post said he knew where the wooden boards were. They had been transported to Madison County, where a resident had continued paying storage fees for the lumber.

During the same meeting in which town staff traced the wood, former Fairfax City Mayor David Meyer disclosed where the chimney bricks had been left: at Vienna Baptist Church, now the Chinese Christian Church of Virginia.

That discovery set the recovery effort in motion.

Hidden marks emerge from the clay

The bricks were not simply old construction material. Anderson said they were made by hand, most likely by enslaved workers on Moore’s property.

Some retained fingerprints pressed into the clay while it was still wet, allowing the Scouts to place their hands over marks left by people more than two centuries earlier.

One brick carried a clearly defined infant footprint centered on its surface. A second brick bore the footprint of another child.

McCarty said the discoveries brought the country’s painful history into sharper focus because the children’s parents were probably enslaved.

The footprints appeared on the broad faces of the bricks, meaning they would have disappeared from sight when the chimney was assembled. Anderson believes that placement may have been intentional—a parent’s effort to leave proof that a child had lived.

Because no record establishes who made the impressions or why, that explanation remains an interpretation. But the marks gave the Scouts a physical connection to people whose lives were rarely documented.

A service project becomes a citizenship lesson

Remmers said the recovery captured Scouting America’s emphasis on service, character and citizenship. By preserving the bricks, the Scouts were helping their community while learning how events in Vienna intersected with the nation’s founding.

Organizers ultimately hope to reconstruct Moorefield if they can obtain sufficient support from grants and foundations.

Anderson said a rebuilt Moorefield could commemorate Moore’s advocacy for religious freedom and the separation of church and state while also preserving the personal traces left by the families he enslaved.