Visiting Waterford

When visiting Waterford, a National Historic Landmark District, you'll step back in time. First settled in 1733 by Amos and Mary Janney, Quakers from Pennsylvania, it was originally known simply as Janney’s Mill. By 1800 it had become the thriving center of a community of small farms. It also had a new name: Waterford. By 1840, many of Waterford’s buildings were already in place: grain, saw and fulling mills, a tannery, furniture factories, a blacksmith shop, tavern, hotel, and even a confectionery to supply Waterford’s burgeoning population of 400 residents. Their homes, places of business, and the rolling fields that surround the village today look much as they did then.

• Visit our one-room schoolhouse built after the Civil War for African American children. It is used today as part of a Living History program that allows schoolchildren to experience a typical 1880s day in a segregated school.

• Peek into the village jail, which housed mischief-makers from the early 1800s until 1936.

• Visit the Fairfax Meeting House cemetery, where Waterford’s early Quakers were laid to rest.
• Send a postcard from Waterford’s post office – the oldest Virginia post office in continuous operation at the same site.
• Stroll our streets to see a remarkable variety of early dwellings, spring houses, barns, former shops, storage buildings, and 19th century churches.
• Come to the Waterford Fair and return to a day from an earlier time. Tour historic houses, watch juried artisan demonstrate techniques of traditional craftsmanship, stroll through the old Mill and vintage barns transformed into galleries for paintings, sketches, dried flowers, baked goods and more.

A Brief History  More history

Waterford’s place in America’s history has always been defined by its agricultural heritage. Its mills were a necessary part of turning raw materials into finished products: wheat into flour, logs into lumber, wool into cloth. The Old Mill that stands at the bottom of Main Street today was built in the 1820s and enlarged in the 1880s. It continued in operation until 1939.

Prior to the Civil War, Waterford was the second largest town in Loudoun County. One of only two communities in Virginia to vote against secession in 1861, it was besieged by both Union and Confederate troops throughout the war. Civil War soldiers, black and white, now lie in peace in the Waterford Union Cemetery, so called because it served as a resting place for members of each of Waterford’s four churches.

A remarkable number of early 18th and 19th century structures survive today, thanks in large part to the vision of two brothers, Leroy and Edward Chamberlin, who, in the 1930s, began to purchase and restore many of the buildings that had fallen into disrepair. Present-day villagers continue to work to preserve Waterford’s historic private residences and their associated outbuildings. The results of their labors are reflected in the carefully preserved and restored houses that line Waterford’s streets today.

Waterford has a rich African-American heritage. In the early 1800s, Waterford was home to several free black families; by 1900, they constituted close to one-third of the village’s residents.