Waterford was settled in 1733 by Amos Janney, a Quaker from Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Janney was soon followed by others and Waterford became the thriving center of a community of small farms. Because the Quakers were grain farmers, a grist mill was very important to them, and the first settlement included a mill near the site of the present structure with a few houses clustered nearby. The settlement that would become Waterford grew around Janney’s Mill. From the 1760s onward, Presbyterians, Methodists and Baptists would also establish a presence here.
A few residents took part in the Revolutionary War; surprisingly, not all Quakers who saw service contrary to the Quaker principles on nonviolence were read out of Meeting. After the Revolution, Waterford grew rapidly with a wide variety of businesses, and by the 1830s, Joseph Martin’s Gazeteer wrote:
“Waterford contains 70 dwelling houses, 2 houses of public worship, 1 free for all denominations, the other a Friends’ meeting house, 6 mercantile stores, 2 free schools, 4 taverns, a manufacturing flour mill, and 1 saw, grist and plaister mill, and (in the vicinity) 2 small cotton manufactories. The mechanics are 1 tanner, 2 house joiners, 2 cabinet makers, 1 chair maker and painter, 1 boot and shoe manufacturer, 2 hatters, 1 tailor, &c. Population about 400 persons, of whom 2 are regular physicians.”
Villagers even produced Shakepeare plays for local audiences.
The Quakers were joined by Scotch-Irish craftsmen from Pennsylvania who were responsible for much of the construction of the village.
While some early residents were slaveholders, the fact that Waterford had a thriving antebellum free Black community was unusual for pre-Civil War Virginia. Waterford’s Quaker roots and the abolitionist sentiments of most Quakers may have encouraged Black settlement here.
By the time of the Civil War, most Waterfordians strongly opposed secession, a stand extremely unpopular among the majority in Loudoun County. For most of the war, the Waterford area was a no-man’s land that neither Federals nor Confederates were able to control for long. As a result of Confederate harassment, miller Samuel Means formed the Independent Loudoun Rangers, the only organized cavalry troop in Virginia to fight for the Union.
In 1871, the railroad was extended from Leesburg to Clarke’s Gap (where Routes 7 and 9 meet) thus bypassing Waterford. The philosophical isolation so obvious during the war was succeeded by a geographic isolation as commercial centers easily reached by rail took business away from Waterford. By the time of the Depression, many of the buildings had deteriorated badly. In the 1930s, brothers Edward and Leroy Chamberlin, descendants of several old Waterford families, began to restore buildings in town and, in 1943, the Waterford Foundation was formed. This provided an impetus for residents, old and new, to work to preserve the village.
Today, Waterford’s buildings and rolling fields look much as they did 200 years ago. The village is a Loudoun County Historic and Cultural Conservation District. In 1970, the entire village with the farmland surrounding it was designated a National Historic Landmark.
