"Before George Mason University started building new labs for engineering students in Manassas, before it coached and mentored more than 100 new startup companies in Fairfax, before it set up a campus in South Korea’s Songdo, or broke ground on a new space in Arlington to collaborate with the likes of Amazon.com Inc., it was just a single building.
One lone building in 1957. And 17 students enrolled through the University of Virginia.
Eventually, UVa. would procure 150 acres from the not-yet-incorporated town of Fairfax to spin off and plant GMU’s main hub there in 1959. Thirteen years later, the Fairfax university’s status reached the desk of former Virginia Gov. Linwood Holton, who signed legislation April 7, 1972, establishing George Mason University as an independent public university.