Waterford
Unionist Stronghold
Historically Quaker and abolitionist Waterford decisively split with Loudoun County's pro-Confederate majority and rejected secession (220 votes to 31) in Virginia's May 1861 referendum. Many residents fled to Maryland as Southern troops occupied the town and its Quaker meeting house to curb "treason."
Confederate Capt. Elijah V. White arrived here in January 1862 to recruit his 35th Battalion Virginia Cavalry from the area's secessionists. (His second in command, Waterford farm boy Lt. Frank Myers, later wrote The Comanches, a history of the battalion.) White's troopers patrolled the border for runaway slaves and Unionist spies until a Union offensive in March 1862 forced a temporary evacuation. Townspeople welcomed Col. John W. Geary's 28th Pennsylvania Infantry with open arms as liberators, after months of Confederate occupation and threats to burn their "cursed Quaker settlement."
Local Unionists, including Quakers, joined Capt. Samuel C. Means's Independent Loudoun Rangers, the only Federal cavalry raised in Confederate Virginia. On August 27, 1862, White's "Rebels" jolted townspeople awake by firing from across the road on your right at the Rangers camped here beside the Baptist Church. When the fight ended, residents were dismayed to learn that White's cavalry had defeated their protectors (see plaque on church front). Means's command served until war's end nonetheless, operating nearby in a "brothers' war" with White's and Col. John S. Mosby's partisans.
Waterford and nearby Lovettsville ("North Loudoun") remained firmly Unionist, with reinstated U.S. mail and trading privileges. In 1863, these communities joined other areas under the Restored Government of Virginia in Alexandria. Here in 1864, three Quaker girls began publishing the Waterford News, an underground Union newspaper.
"You just aught to have seen how glad [the were] to see us Yankees."
- Cpl. James P. Steward, 28th Pennsylvania Infantry, March 23, 1862
Marker is at the intersection of Patrick Street and High Street (County Route 665), on the right when traveling west on Patrick Street.
Courtesy hmdb.org
