First, it latched on to Vernon Peterson, the 81-year-old caretaker at the venerable Rock Hill Cemetery. Peterson was walking past Weaver’s tombstone one day when something stopped him cold.
“It was as if it grabbed me by the leg,” he said. The name, carved in the shape of an arch. The mysterious letters underneath. “It got to me so much I had to try to find out what it meant.”
Peterson researched Weaver’s story and told it to local historian Kevin D. Grigsby. And now the old soldier from Company D and hundreds of other black men from Loudoun who fought for freedom in the Civil War are getting their due.
Grigsby has resurrected their names and some of their stories in a book, “From Loudoun to Glory,” about the forgotten role of African Americans from the county during the war and its aftermath.
