Sarah “Sally” Cary was born about 1730 or 1735 at a Cary family plantation near Hampton, Virginia. She was one of the daughters of Colonel Wilson Cary and Sarah Blair Cary. The Carys belonged to Virginia’s wealthy planter aristocracy and were connected through marriage to many leading families. Sally grew up amid substantial property, enslaved labor, formal visiting, and the expectation that daughters would strengthen family alliances through marriage. Her education was probably conducted at home through tutors and female relatives. A young woman of her position learned reading, writing, religion, music, dancing, needlework, household accounts, and the elaborate manners of gentry sociability. Sally became known for intelligence, wit, beauty, and accomplished conversation. Those qualities mattered in a society where plantation homes served as centers of hospitality, business, courtship, and political exchange. In 1748 she married George William Fairfax, son of William Fairfax of Belvoir. The marriage united the Cary family with a branch of the influential Fairfax family and made Sally mistress of Belvoir, near Mount Vernon. George William had spent part of his childhood in the Bahamas and occupied a somewhat complicated place within the British aristocratic hierarchy, but he inherited status and extensive Virginia connections. At Belvoir, Sally entered the social circle of the young George Washington, then an ambitious surveyor and militia officer. The Fairfaxes helped introduce Washington to elite manners, books, theater, and influential patrons. Sally’s education and confidence made her an important conversational companion. Washington’s surviving 1758 letter referring to the power of her beauty has encouraged speculation about romance, but the precise nature of their attachment remains uncertain and should not be overstated. Before later memory made her famous chiefly through Washington, Sally had already been formed by the disciplines and privileges of the Virginia gentry: family alliance, domestic administration, cultivated sociability, and life within a plantation system. Marriage placed her at Belvoir, where those skills made her a significant figure in the young Washington’s social education.