Loudoun Cemeteries

Some of the soldiers that died at the Second Battle of Manassas are buried at Sharon Cemetery, including 81 Confederate soldiers. The cemetery contains a large obelisk, dating from the early 20th century, with unknown Confederate dead buried beneath and enclosed by a circle of plain gravestones of known soldiers. The obelisk was erected and maintained by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (c.1910). Hickory Tree Hall, a large columned structure formerly known as “Confederate Hall,” was brought to Middleburg in 1909 from the Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition of 1907. It was first located on the property of the current Exxon station at 208 E. Washington Street and later moved in 1972 to Hickory Tree Farm. In 1948, the UDC could no longer care for the building and sold it for $2,488. Nearly all the proceeds went towards the maintainence of the Sharon Cemetery obelisk and site. The iron Maltese crosses with a central "CSA" (Confederate States of America) that mark many gravesites of Southern veterans are paid for by veterans' families and other individuals.

Virginia Military Institute (VMI) cadet Bolling Walker Barton was born in Winchester, VA, on November 24, 1846, and entered VMI on September 25, 1862 (class of 1866). The VMI Corps of Cadets fought as a unit at the Battle of New Market (VA) on May 15, 1864. Ten cadets were killed in battle or died later from the effects of their wounds; 45 were wounded. The youngest participating cadet was 15; the oldest 25. In November 1864 Barton joined the 1st Foreign Battalion. After the Civil War he studied and practiced medicine, and also taught Botany at Johns Hopkins University. He married Ella Jane Gibson in 1872; the couple had no children. He died in Loudoun County, VA, on February 18, 1924.

Waterford cemetery contains the remains of at least twelve Union soldiers, including several who served in the Waterford-based Loudoun Rangers, the only organized military unit from Virginia to fight for the Union. The Loudoun Rangers were an independent cavalry unit drawn from the largely Quaker and German farming communities of northern Loudoun County, Virginia.  Captain Samuel C. Means , who commanded the Loudoun Rangers during the Civil War, recently received a U.S. government-issued headstone for his burial site, 138 years after his death in Washington D.C. The headstone was dedicated on Saturday, March 26, 2022, at a ceremony at Rock Creek Cemetery held by the Lincoln-Cushing Camp of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War (SUVCW), the successor organization to the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR).

Photo: 1903 Reunion of Loudoun Rangers at Taylorstown (sometimes identified as 1910). Front row, left to right: Charles W. Virts , Briscoe Goodhart, John P. Hickman, Joseph T. Divine, George Davis, Samuel Tritapoe, and Isaac Hough. Back row, left to right: John Densmore, George Wilt, Robert W. Hough, John Davis, John Lenhart, Daniel Harper, and Thomas Harrison. (Photo courtesy of t he Waterford Foundation Archives and Local History Collection) Bulletin of Loudoun County History, 2020/21 Edition

James Lewis was a Waterford resident at the time of his enlistment as a private in the 55th Massachusetts Infantry. He enlisted in May 1863 at Pittsburgh and was mustered out in August 1865 at Charleston, SC. From 1863 on, he served further south on the battlefields and picket lines of Florida and South Carolina. At least seven other enslaved or freeborn Black Americans from Waterford enlisted with the Union Army, either with state outfits like the 54th and 55th Massachusetts, or with the nation’s first U.S. Colored Troops regiments. After the war many southern Black soldiers settled in Ohio, New York, or even Texas, but James Lewis came home to Virginia. James returned to Waterford, married, and built a small house in 1877 on Butchers Row.

The 55th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment was a volunteer regiment made up of men who wanted to enter the Union Army’s 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, the first officially recognized Black military unit in the United States (highlighted in the 1989 Civil War film, Glory). In 1863, when Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew saw the demand for enlistment in the 54th, he created the 55th Regiment. Like the 54th, the 55th was commanded by white officers, many of whom were from abolitionist families.  https://waterfordcemetery.org/people/james-lewis/ 

Union Veteran - U.S. Colored Troops Infantry Son of Henson Young (Senior). He was enslaved by William Russell, Sr., of Waterford. He was later freed and went on to join the 1st United States Colored Infantry at Baltimore. He returned to Waterford after the war and became a trustee of the John Wesley Methodist Church.

 https://waterfordcemetery.org/people/henson-young/ 

Ida Lee Rust was the daughter of Edmund Jennings Lee, first cousin of Robert E. Lee. Ida spent her married life at “Rockland,” the Rust family home near Leesburg, and in her later years lived in a house build by her sons at 113 East Cornwall Street in Leesburg. Ida Lee Park was made possible by the generous donation of prime, undeveloped land formerly known as the Greenwood Farm by the Rust Family. In 1986, William F. Rust and his wife, Margaret Dole Rust, donated 138 acres to the Town of Leesburg for perpetual use as a public park which was named in memory of Mr. Rust’s grandmother, Ida Lee, to preserve an important historic link between the Lee Family of Virginia and the Town of Leesburg.

Image:  Ida (Lee) Rust, Rust Portraits at Rockland, Leesburg, Loudoun County, Virginia 

A 2011  Washington Post  article highlighted the intersection of East Market Street and Catoctin Circle in Leesburg. At that site in 1839, the Town of Leesburg acquired a half-acre, half of it “for the burial of white persons and the other half for the burial of free persons of colour.” Interments continued well into the 20th century. The County had jurisdiction over Potter’s Field, the cemetery’s common name, because it was then outside the town limits. Some years later, when Leesburg’s limits were extended to include the graveyard, the town hired Glenn Weatherholtz to clean the grounds and tell Slack’s Funeral home where to dig the graves. The interments, paid for by the county, were listed as “pauper burials.” By 1980, the east end of Leesburg was ripe for development. A survey computed Potter’s Field to be .29 acres, about 60 percent of its original half-acre size. Weatherholtz estimated the number of burial sites as 70 or 80. In 1982, when the town commissioned a preliminary archeological survey, the .29 acres had been assessed for $243,000. In summer 1983, the archaeologists completed their survey and found 308 burial sites; they estimated 100 or more lay beneath Market Street and the dirt spur that would become the extensions of Catoctin Circle. The archaeologists told the Town that their report would recommend a more intensive survey. Alarmed that a second survey would stymie widening of East Market Street, force a relocation of the north end of Catoctin Circle and preclude the sale of Potter’s Field, the Town ordered the archaeologists to stop work before they wrote the report. In November 1983, a truckload of bones and remains were spilled into a vault donated by the Loudoun Funeral Chapel. A crane lowered the vault into a large opening that had been dug in a corner of Leesburg’s Union Cemetery. The inscription on the small gravestone reads: “Unknown Citizens Reinterred From the Town of Leesburg’s Cemetery 1983.”  

A former slave, Mary was held in bondage by Thomas Swann (governor of Maryland from 1866-69), who lived at Morven Park in Leesburg from 1834-1861. An article titled "Good Colored Woman Dead, said to be 108 Years Old" appeared on the front page of the Sept. 15, 1921, issue of the Loudoun Mirror. At the time of her death, Mary was thought to be the oldest person in Virginia.

Watch the video on  Mt. Zion and Mary Mallory  posted by the Loudoun Museum and the Mosby Heritage Area.    

Gaskins’s regiment was organized in 1864 in Baltimore, MD, and saw significant action on the battlefield, including the Siege of Petersburg in VA, and the battles of Fort Fisher and Wilmington in North Carolina. After the end of the war Gaskins returned to Loudoun where he married Hannah Buchanan and had at least five children. (Grigsby 251)

Born in Middleburg, John Wanzer was the 5th of 14 children. He took a job in Will Mitchell’s blacksmith shop to learn a trade, and a few years later bought the blacksmith and wheelwright shop business. For years his was the only shop of its kind in Middleburg, and he was one of Loudoun County’s most successful African American businessmen. Wanzer served as president of the County-Wide League which organized in 1930s to campaign for better schools and an accredited Black high school, which was built in 1941 (Douglass High School). 

William Hall learned the stonemason trade from his father and later started his own contracting and real estate businesses with only a 7th grade education. He was elected to Board of Directors of Loudoun County Emancipation Association in 1932. With his father, Nathan, he formed W.N. Hall & Son, builders of such notable Middleburg stone public buildings as the Phoenix Building, old Middleburg National Bank, Firehouse, and Upperville’s Fauquier Loudoun Bank (now the Upperville Post Office). Their reputation won them the contract in 1932 to rebuild George Washington’s grist mill at Mt. Vernon. As the largest building firm in Loudoun, they built the new wing of Leesburg hospital, 1949-50. 

Raymond and his brother Thomas (1884 - 1940) lived near Marble Quarry and had two of the largest Black-owned farms in the county --- more than 100 acres each. Raymond bred and trained horses and showed them in St. Louis (village in southwest Loudoun). George Berryman, their grandfather, was a founder of the St. Louis Colored Colt Show, along with Charles McQuay. Established in 1898 to show horses and colts and to stage races and jumping contests, it was intended as an African-American alternative to the exclusionary Upperville Colt and Horse Show.

Carr P. Cook, Jr., graduated in 1937 from the Loudoun Training School in Leesburg and joined his father in the family roofing contracting business begun in 1913. He served in the Army in Europe during WWII as a staff sergeant and was the first African American to run for public office in Leesburg. Cook served as the first Black school board member (1976-84) and as a chairman of the Middleburg Planning Commission, spearheading development of a Comprehensive Plan and affordable housing. He was also one of the first African American people to serve on a Grand Jury in Loudoun. 

Hessian Soldier Friedrich Schloetz (d. 19 Sep 1830), his wife Margaret Schloetz (12 Nov 1764 – 20 Apr 1828), along with their children Adam (30 Apr 1796 – 21 Jan 1831) and 1-year old daughter Elizabeth (19 Oct 1789 – 1 Nov 1790) and grandson George (1 Sept 1821 – 4 Oct 1822) were originally buried in the old cemetery with their grave markers using an anglicized version of their name: “Slates.” In 1941 a new marker was placed in Lovettsville Union Cemetery with the original spelling, “Schloetz.”  

The rural cemetery became popular in the United States and Europe in the mid-nineteenth. Prior to that time most burial grounds were sectarian and located on small plots and churchyards within a city or town. These larger rural cemeteries allowed for the purchase of family plots large enough to allow the burial of several generations of a single family. In 1847, the New York State Legislature passed the Rural Cemetery Act which authorized commercial burial grounds in New York. The law led to the burial of human remains becoming a commercial business for the first time. By the 1860s, rural cemeteries could be found on the outskirts of cities and smaller towns across the country.  

The incorporation of natural imagery was a large part of the Rural Cemetery Movement. Gravestones designed for rural cemeteries tend to reflect this trend and many examples of animals, plants, flowers, and tree trunks (as seen in Union Lovettsville). Among the more common animal examples are doves and lambs, often used to adorn the graves of children. With their strong religious associations, these symbols were used to communicate the innocence and purity of the deceased. The lamb marker in particular can be found atop many gravestones around Loudoun County, including ones at Hillsboro Cemetery for Jack Lee Case (1923 –1925), Robert L. Fowler (1935- 1936), and Susan K. Creel (1963 – 1969).  

William Grubb (13 Feb 1735 – 27 Nov 1816) was the founder of the Loudoun County Grubb family. He was the (probably adopted) son of Joseph and Sarah Grubb of Brandywine Hundred, Delaware. William married his cousin Rachael Grubb at Old Swedes Church in 1762 and they had ten children.

Ebenezer Grubb (31 May 1763 – 12 Jan 1835), the oldest son of William and Rachael Grubb, was a Loudoun County farmer who married Ester Lodge in 1788. He adopted her son Jacob Grubb and they had at least three additional children before she died in 1800. He then married Mary Smallwood and they had eight more children.

The early descendents of the Grubb family are buried at a family plot in Hillsboro and some of the later family are buried in Hillsboro Cemetery.