Delivered Before the Loudoun County Historical Society, November 16, 1962 By Asa Moore Janney The members of the Religious Society of Friends were the last of the three elements which make up our county to arrive. With the coming of the Friends, the Germans were pretty well settled in that part of the county north and northwest of Waterford, and the slave holders were to the southeast of the Catoctin Hills and in the southwestern part of the county. Loudoun’s Friends were introduced to the county, no doubt, by the settlement of Friends along the Opekon Creek in what was then Orange County, now Frederick, before the year 1732. In 1734, when George Washington was two years old, these Friends from Pennsylvania and Elk River in Maryland, applied for and were granted from East Nottingham Meeting in Cecil County, Maryland, a meeting for worship which they called Hopewell. The next year this was enlarged to a monthly meeting for business and discipline under what came to be called Concord Quarterly Meeting, composed of East Nottingham and Chester Quarterly Meeting held at Concord, Chester County, Pennsylvania, and attached to Philadelphia Meeting. At nearly the same time a Meeting at Monocacy, Maryland, just across the Blue Ridge due east of Hagerstown, Maryland, in Prince George County, was included in Hopewell Meeting. Without a doubt it was this proximity of Hopewell Meeting to Loudoun County which prompted Friends from the same meetings in Pennsylvania and Maryland who established Hopewell to set up their meetings in Loudoun. The good word that there were fine lands in Prince William County got around, for in February of 1730 Samuel Marksberry ran a survey for his grant “on Kittockton Mountain near the Thoroughfare or Hunting Path thru said Mountain.” This place we now call Clarks Gap. Lower down the Catoctin Creek the Irishman, Asa Moore, had in 1732, according to tradition, built a home on the South Branch of Catoctin and called it after his native Waterford. While Moore probably had neighbors, unknown to us to-day, it was not long before Amos Janney in 1733 left his home at the Falls of the Delaware in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and settled in the Waterford community along with several Janneys, Thomas John, Edward Morton, Samuel Harris, Thomas Bourne and others. Since John Mercer, land speculator, and Catesby Cocke, clerk of Prince William County and later of Fairfax, had already been granted the land around Waterford, these early Friends must have leased or bought from them, for we find in the Fairfax County, records that David Potts in 1746 leased 866 acres of land on “Kittockton Run from Catesby Cocke for (5) five Shillings, paid in Hand, with the right to Purchase and an annual Rental of one Ear of Indian Corn.”