James Wren served as a justice of the County Court. He was a trustee of the Town of Turberville which in 1798 was laid off on land near the Little Falls of the Potomac but never fulfilled the hopes of its promoters. Following his military service in the Revolutionary War he held various offices in the County government, including that of sheriff and commissioner of the tax. He acquired extensive landholdings in Fairfax and Loudoun Counties. James Wren was married three times; first, in 1753, to Catherine Brent of Overwharton Parish (Aquia Church); next, about 1771-74 to Valinda Wade, and last, to Sarah Jones of Alexandria in 1804. He died in 1815 and was buried at Long View.[145] The architecture which James Wren created for the courthouse--as well as his churches and the numerous private buildings he designed and built under contract or for his friends--reflect the general level to which that art had advanced in colonial Virginia. The styles were adapted from prototypes in England.[146] Innovations which were made in adapting these styles to American use were, in most instances, attributable to the differences in building materials and the types of skilled labor which were available to the American builder. _The Origin of the Courthouse Design._ The architectural design which James Wren selected for the Fairfax County Courthouse utilized several features which already were familiar hallmarks of public buildings in colonial Virginia, and in particular the colonial capitol at Williamsburg--probably the most impressive public building in Virginia at that time. The use of brick as building material, the use of two stories, topped by a cupola, and, most strikingly, the use of arches, all combined to suggest the influence of this capitol building on the courthouse design.[147] The courthouse was far from being a copy of the capitol and Wren added to these familiar features several new ones that made the courthouse an architectural innovation in its own right. When it was completed in 1800, the Fairfax County Courthouse was the first example of a new design which architectural historians have called "the town hall style,"[148] and have traced to English town halls of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Like the Fairfax County Courthouse, these town halls were two-story brick or stone buildings which presented to their front a gable-end, ground-floor arcade (or piazza) covering the main opening onto the street, an entrance set into the end wall, and, frequently, a cupola. The town halls of Blandford in Dorset (1734), and Amersham in Buckinghamshire (1682) illustrate these features with variations of details.