The Quaker Influence Still Visible

The Quaker Influence Still Visible

By M.J. McAteer

Loudoun County real estate has never been more expensive, but there was a time in the early 18th century when Lord Fairfax, in a bid to populate his western holdings, was granting 99-year leases on 100 acres of land for today’s equivalent of about $5.

That was a sweet deal even then, and did not go unnoticed by members of the thrifty Religious Society of Friends. These Quakers--a derogatory term at the time--had settled in Bucks County near Philadelphia, but property there had gotten pricy by their standards, so hundreds decamped south to take advantage of the bargain Lord Fairfax offered.

The Hillsboro Mill was mostly destroyed during the Civil War.

Photos by M.J. McAteer

The Waterford Mill is a stately landmark in the town.

Being industrious, and tight with a penny, these transplants prospered, and subsequently founded some of the most picturesque villages in western Loudoun (then part of Fairfax), including Taylorstown, Waterford, Lincoln, Hillsboro and Unison.

Richard Brown was an early arrival, and he built a mill on Catoctin Creek in what is now Taylorstown, just south of the Maryland border. He was forced to use other men’s slaves to do the job, though, and, although he paid them, it had to have been repugnant to him, because the Friends were abolitionists.

In Taylorstown today, a circa 1800 Quaker mill, now a private residence, hides in plain sight behind a thick curtain of greenery. Nearby Brown’s home, Hunting Hill, pretty Foxton Cottage can be glimpsed. Both houses date to the 1730s, making them among the oldest standing buildings in Loudoun, according to Taylorstown resident Richard T. Gillespie. Waterford is probably the best-known of the county’s Quaker villages. In 1733, Amos Janney built two mills there, which anchored a settlement that would become known as Janney’s Mill.

By the mid-19th century, the village, renamed Waterford, had become a commercial hub, according to local historian Bronwen Souders. A stroll along its quaint streets today is a walk through that time.

A massive, 1818 brick mill with a broken, rusting water wheel sits at the foot of a Main Street that is lined with period houses crowding the road. Although the 1761 Fairfax Meeting house is now a private home, the Quaker graveyard still spreads across a hillside behind it, and it’s a quiet spot to contemplate both the settlers’ moxie and their mortality.

For looks, though, another village founded by another Janney—Jacob—gives Waterford some competition. In what was Goose Creek, just south of Purcellville, the former stone meeting house with its raised beds full of flowers sits in a cluster with the active meeting house and the Quaker cemetery.

The one-room Oakdale School is nearby, and for 70 years, in defiance of segregation, Quaker children and the children of freed slaves were educated there together. Friends in Lincoln were believed to be active in the Underground Railroad, as well.

The village was eventually renamed Lincoln in a bid to get its own post office, and, the USPS continues to operate out of the old Janney store next to the meeting house.

Sadly, little evidence of the Quakers has survived in Hillsboro, other than a graveyard, a private home, and the stone ruins of Potts Neer Mill. In 1864, Union troops burned the mill along with crops in the area to cut off Confederate supplies.

Unlike the Lincoln Quakers, members of Hillsboro’s Gap Meeting fell short of the piety demanded by their sect, and they were called out by elders for their “great deficiencies.” Their meeting was discontinued in 1765, “indulged” again in 1772, and finally “laid down” in 1812.

The story was similar in Butterland, now called Unison, where members of the South Fork Meeting engaged in decidedly un-Friendly-like behavior. “From the very start they were in trouble,” resident Mitch Diamond said. “They drank, fought, gambled, and held horse races.”

Quaker documents described them as “worldly” and the cause of “great concern,” and many were disowned by the Society. By 1836, the Unison meeting, too, was “laid down.”

In a case of letting bygones be bygones, though, the shady and serene 1771 burying ground about a mile outside Unison to this day is maintained by members of Lincoln’s Goose Creek Meeting. And, there lies Mandly George Fleming (1833-1862), whose grave bears a surprisingly poetic inscription for one of such plain-spoken folk:

“Death like an overflowing steam,

Sweeps us away, our life’s a dream,

An empty sound, a morning flower,

Cut down and withered in an hour.”

It took much more than an hour to wither away the Quakers presence in Loudoun County, but the member’s ardent anti-slavery principles and their staunch pacifism eventually made their Southern home an unhappy fit. Both before and after the Civil War, many decided to move on to Ohio. Happily, though, their benign influence remains to be seen in the quaint villages they left behind in Western Loudoun County.

For a driving tour of the Quaker sites of Loudoun County, visit https://www.piedmontheritage.org/drivingtours.