Figure of the Week

John O. Tackett was one of four known children of Charles Addison Tackett (1814-1896) of Stafford County, Virginia. The first of this interesting family to come to the New World was Lewis Tacquitt, a French Huguenot who settled on Cedar Run (now Fauquier County) just below Broad Run. Sometime prior to 1872, John O. Tackett commenced running a stable on the Stafford Courthouse lot to care for the horses ridden or driven to court. From 1871 to 1875, he was Clerk of the Circuit Court. In Stafford, the Tackett family owned and operated Tackett’s Mills on the upper part of Aquia Run. For years, this local landmark provided a place to have grain ground, a store that carried many necessities, a lumber mill, post office, and a school. Tackett’s Mill was long the center of the upper Aquia Run community. In the late twentieth century, the surviving iron gearing from the mill was dismantled, moved, and reassembled in a shopping center at Lake Ridge in Prince William County, Virginia. John O. Tackett was a minister and was buried in the Tackett-Burroughs family cemetery near Remington in Fauquier County.