Mar 27

Mar 27 Extended Interview: The Road to Waterloo

Adolphus Smoot of Waterloo, Fauquier County, Virginia.

Rachael Bailey, Waterloo, Fauquier County, Virginia.

The first service at Waterloo Baptist Church. 1895.

Waterloo Baptist, my family’s church, and the cemetery sit at the intersection of Old Waterloo Road and Rt. 688. Both give way to the former historic Black community of Waterloo where certain lines of my family can trace deep roots to the mid-to latter part of the 19th century. Families such as the Smoots, the Baileys, the Lawsons, the Miners, the Tines, the Craigs, the Settles, the Sankers have called this area home and many of their descendants still do, albeit in much fewer numbers. Behind Waterloo Baptist, many members who laid their well-placed hopes lie in eternal rest. The green brush behind the cemetery back the headstones that vary from little metal plates with names and years of births and deaths to stones with unclear etchings to more modern headstones with all the contemporary expectations.

I first came to this “little church on the side of the road” as the elders say when I was 19 in 1999. My great-aunt Virginia, my grandmother’s sister had passed, and I remember making the trek with my immediate Maryland-based family who also knew very little about their Waterloo and Fauquier County connections. My mother, Jacqueline, her younger sister, Joyce, and her two then toddler children made the trek. As a teenager, I barely even noted the great surrounding beauty that now arrests me each drive I make twice monthly.

The idealized green suburbs of Maryland where I grew up hardly even register in comparison to the Virginia Piedmont. Upon entering Fauquier’s mix of pastoral beauty edged by pristine wilderness, even my idyllic “suburban-rural” town of Bowie, Maryland feels like a concrete jungle. But even with its unrelenting pastoral beauty and countless nods to the past, Waterloo of today is not the Waterloo of yesterday. So, in the telling of “The Road to Waterloo,” I try to unfold the growth of this historic Black community.

The Craigs, the Smoots, the Baileys, the Lawsons were all family members that made their home in the community of Waterloo at different times. There were and are other families that lived here who intermarried with the above families making Waterloo essentially one big family. There were the Sankers, the Miners, the Brooks and the Tines, and descendants still live in the area, including my family’s oldest member Rachel Stevens, born to Joseph Travis Smoot and Rachel Elizabeth Bailey. She is the center of my research and unequivocally she is the connection between the Lawsons, Baileys, Smoots. Just as her mother, she continues as the Waterloo Church Clerk. So, this year long journey has very much centered her rightfully as the true family and Waterloo historian. She knows the peoples stories. Patsy Jones, Rachel’s as well as my cousin has been the

The land which would become the community was purchased plot by plot from John Ramey. But the land that would house the school and church of Waterloo was purchased on May 21, 1895 in the amount of $25.00, the equivalent of $762.00 in today’s money. The listed trustees were James Brooks, Frank Bailey, Thomas Smoot and Henry Smoot, and the first installed pastor was Reverend James Colbert of Ruckersville, Virginia.

The Smoots in particular had come from the community of Jeffersonton in Culpeper County, while the Baileys had earlier Fauquier ties from the communities of what would be Waterloo and Orlean. The Lawsons would be bridged by my second-great grandmother Mary Frances Lawson. She would marry a Bailey, Henry Bailey and then later Adolphus Smoot.

Henry Smoot, Adolphus Smoot, and my great-grandfather Joseph Smoot were instrumental in the Waterloo community. My great-grandfather was the youngest of the Smoot children belonging to Travis Smoot and Mary Clara Logan. Joseph Smoot was also the one who was not raised by his parents directly as family lore reveals. His father, my second great-grandfather, Travis Smoot was remembered to be cruel against some of his children, particularly Joseph and it is rumored that Joseph was raised by a white family in Jeffersonton, Culpeper roughly 5 miles from Waterloo, Fauquier County, Virginia.

My research into Waterloo begins in July 2018 and there is an immediate pride and connection. That little church by the side of the road that I came to in 1999 is still emitting spirit. And though the community of Waterloo today does not fully resemble the community at the turn of the century nor the middle 20th century, it becomes apparent that if you scrape below the surface there is much to be told.

My great-aunt Rachel Stevens is the conduit for it.