The Loudoun County Courthouse - Oatlands - The National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom

Below is the rationale for including the Loudoun County Courthouse as a member of the National Underground Railroad Network, a National Park Service organization.The text included here was taken from the application for membership submitted by the Loudoun County Courthouse to the Network. Network members are those who are “attempting to identify, document, preserve and interpret sites. . . related to the Underground Railroad.”

The Loudoun County Courthouse site is significant to the history of the Underground Railroad in Virginia. On this site Leesburg attorney John Janney took part in at least two trials. In 1840 Janney obtained the least punishment possible for free-born carriage-driver Leonard Grimes for stealing slave Patty and her six children on behalf of Patty’s free husband. Grimes served two years in a Richmond jail; Patty and her family reportedly reached safety in Canada. In the second trial, Janney successfully argued the 1846 acquittal of freed slave Nelson Talbott Gant for stealing his slave wife Maria with the help of Underground Railroad agents in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Gant was then able to purchase Maria’s freedom and the couple moved to Ohio. Gant and Grimes, along with many others of their race, had been registered as free at the courthouse.

Leonard Andrew Grimes

[This account is heavily dependent on an article, “Leonard Grimes, 1814?-1874” cited with permission from author Deborah A. Lee, in The Essence of a People II, African Americans Who Made Their World Anew in Loudoun County, Virginia, and Beyond, Edited by Kendra Hamilton, published in Leesburg, Virginia, by the Black History Committee of the Friends of Thomas Balch Library, 2002.]

Leonard Andrew Grimes was born free in Leesburg, and was a twelve-year-old boy when his parents Andrew and Polly Grimes registered their status as free Negroes in 1826 at the Loudoun County Courthouse in Leesburg. When young, Grimes worked for a butcher and apothecary in Washington, D.C., but maintained his ties to Loudoun. When about twenty years of age in 1834, he registered his free status at the courthouse in Leesburg.

When working for a slaveholder, traveling to the Deep South where he observed the harshness of slavery, Grimes resolved to help freedom seekers. Returning to Washington in the mid or late 1830s, he became a hackney carriage driver, providing transportation for politicians, professionals, and others in the national capital’s environs. He married, became the father of two children, became owner of property at the corner of H and 22nd Streets, and earned the respect of the blacks and whites that knew him.

At risk to himself and his family, he became a part of a network of assistance to enslaved African Americans escaping to the North. He served as a conductor, a role for which his job as a hackney driver gave him the perfect cover. In 1839 when he was about 25 years old, he was caught. Engaged by a free black man to rescue his wife and six children—all held in slavery in Loudoun by Joseph Meade—Grimes completed the rescue, taking the family into DC. However, according to testimony he was glimpsed by the daughter of William Hardy, the keeper of a coach stop on the Georgetown and Leesburg Turnpike [now route 7] at Dranesville.

Ann Farr, a friend of Hardy’s daughter, later claimed that Hardy said she saw Grimes and his carriage approaching around dusk one day in late October. She assumed Grimes would stop as usual to give his passengers rest and refreshment, but Grimes continued past, and Farr claimed Hardy “distinctly saw the head of a person, with a hat on, through the small side light in the curtain of the barouche.” Although at the time, Hardy may have presumed that the passenger preferred another stop further down the road, she apparently later suspected that Grimes was transporting escaping slaves. The Alexandria Gazette and Local Advertiser, March 2, 1840, rumored that the fleeing family reached freedom in Canada.

Eventually Meade heard the claim that Grimes assisted the runaways. So, on January 20, 1840, Meade swore out a warrant against him. By March 2nd, Grimes was arrested by the marshal of DC without bail and taken to Leesburg for trial. As the court convened on March 10th, the courthouse was packed, with the audience watching with “breathless attention.” Grimes’s legal defense—headed by General Walter Jones of Washington, D.C., with assistance from John Janney and B.W. Harrison of Loudoun County—attacked the evidence as circumstantial and argued eloquently on Grime's behalf, describing his upstanding character. Nonetheless, Grimes was convicted and sentenced to two years in the state penitentiary in Richmond plus a $100 fine. This relatively light penalty was credited to “the former good character of the Prisoner.”

The day after the trial, Grimes signed an indenture for his real and personal property so that his wife and children would have money to live on managed by his uncle William Bush (who later moved to New Bedford where he participated in the Underground Railroad). Grimes' attorneys and well-placed friends twice unsuccessfully petitioned the Virginia governor for a pardon. Once freed, Grimes moved his family to New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1846. The whaling community included many African Americans, and not surprisingly was a center of antislavery activity. Grimes became a part of this network of providing assistance to freedom seekers. From there he moved to Boston in 1848 where he became pastor of the Twelfth Baptist Church, known as the "Fugitive Church." He continued to work with the Underground Railroad, notably in cases of Anthony Burns, Thomas Sims, and Shadrach Minkins, who had escaped to Boston .

Gant Trial

[The nominator is deeply indebted to descendant Victoria Robinson for compiling this research.]

Nelson Talbott Gant, whose manumission by the last will and testament of John Nixon was recorded in September 1845 at the Loudoun County Courthouse , left Loudoun on October 1846, promising to return for his wife Maria (a slave of CAE Jane Russell of Leesburg) in six weeks. He was required by Virginia law to leave no more than a year after being freed, and he had hopes of earning money to return and redeem her. He traveled to Washington County, Pennsylvania, where he met Dr. Julius LeMoyne and wife, abolitionists and conductors on the Underground Railroad, as well as Martin Delaney of Pittsburgh, an active participant on the Underground Railroad.

From there Gant crossed the Ohio River and went to Zanesville, Ohio, where most of the remaining Nixon slaves (who had been removed in compliance with the provisions of Nixon’s will) resided. Here Gant learned about the abolitionists of Putnam, located across the Licking River from Zanesville (at that time). A.A. Guthrie and other Zanesville and Putnam agents of the UGRR helped Gant arrange to "steal" his wife out of slavery .

In November Gant returned to Leesburg for Maria, made a second attempt to buy his wife, was rebuffed, then left. Maria disappeared at the same time. Charles Eskridge, County Clerk and a neighbor of Miss Russell, sent her a note several days later, alerting her to Maria’s disappearance. Gant and his wife were caught in Washington D.C. and jailed, having been betrayed by “an old colored man” in Washington. After almost a month, both were removed to Virginia on the demand of the Governor of Virginia. Both were put in Loudoun County jail but after 12 or so days, Maria was returned to her mistress while Nelson remained in jail.

On December 12, 1846 Gant was tried in Loudoun County’s courthouse, but with the legal assistance of John Janney, the man who later would preside over Virginia’s secessionist convention, and two other attorneys, Gant was acquitted of the charges. Key to his defense was the principle that a wife could not be compelled to testify against her husband.

Two months later, Gant’s friends in Ohio and Virginia collected enough money to help him buy his wife’s freedom. Nelson and Maria remained in Loudoun County, working for Mr. Thomas Nichols to repay monies loaned to him by Mr. Nichols.

In September 1847 the Commonwealth Attorney succeeded in getting a Grand Jury indictment issued for Gant, along with 15 or so other free Negroes for remaining in the state more than 12 months after being granted their freedom. It appears the order may not have been served because in every Quarterly Court thereafter the bill of indictment is re-presented.

The Gants seem to have lived “under the radar” for the next three years; they appear neither on tax records nor the 1850 census. In June 1850, however, the Grand Jury indictment against Gant was dismissed and the couple, along with a one-year old daughter left Loudoun for Zanesville. There they lived the rest of their lives, where Nelson eventually purchased land for his home and farm and made his living as a farmer and gardener of specialty vegetables.

Gant died July 14, 1905 at the age of 84. An article in the Zanesville Daily News described him as a slave born in Loudoun County, Virginia, who earned money to purchase his sweetheart in Virginia then returned to Ohio. The story concluded that he was “probably the wealthiest colored citizen in Ohio”, possessing a fortune estimated at “several hundred thousand."