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In 1922, Lida Dutton Hutchinson’s daughter ran across her mother’s old diary. That in itself was not necessarily a “Eureka!” moment; lots of 19th-century women kept diaries. But packed away with this one was a collection of curious old papers—issues of a Civil War–era broadsheet called The Waterford News.

The little newspaper, written in Hutchinson’s hometown of Waterford, Va., detailed life in a border village in the last grueling year of the Civil War. Intrigued, Emma Conrow subsequently wrote an article for The Baltimore American based on her mother’s diary and what she found in The Waterford News.

But eventually the diary—and the papers—disappeared. And the story behind them disappeared, too. Until 1955, that is, when two issues of The Waterford News surfaced, of all places, among the Abraham Lincoln papers at the Library of Congress.

Which begs the question of why a little newssheet from an insignificant hamlet in a rebellious state would attract the attention of the chief executive of the United States.

For a publication largely forgotten after the war, The Waterford News once attracted a lot of attention. Maybe it was because it was an underground pro-Union publication emanating from Confederate territory. Maybe it was because its editors were all under 27.

Or maybe it was because these three gutsy young scribes were women.

Tucked away in the rolling landscape of northern Loudoun County, postcard-pretty Waterford today is something of an anomaly.While much of Northern Virginia has morphed into an interminable web of freeways wrapped around rampant development, Waterford retains original narrow streets lined with 18th- and 19th-century homes and shop buildings, their preservation fostered for decades by the National Historic Landmark status that encompasses the entire village. Residents stroll to the post office to pick up their mail, and back in the ’90s, they actually fought efforts to bring cable television to town.

If Waterford is a bit incongruous now, it was an even greater oddity in the 19th century. Founded in the 1730s by pacifist Pennsyl-vania Quakers who had migrated to Virginia, Water-ford bucked the local political trend in 1861 when residents voted 221 to 31 against secession. Loudoun County as a whole voted for secession by a margin of 2 to 1.

The Quakers in Waterford “took the formal position of neutrality early in the war,” says local historian John Souders, “but in the final years many were actively aiding the Union.” Most of the village’s young men had fled to avoid being conscripted into the Confederate Army. By June 1861, Souders says, “when the local militia was to be sworn into the Virginia regimental forces, 80 percent had gone across the [Potomac] river” to Maryland.

Waterford’s obstinacy—and its precarious location on the very edge of the North-South demarcation—made the village a particular target for harassment. Rebel troops quickly occupied Waterford, helping themselves to food and livestock and taking up residence in the Quaker meetinghouse. And when those troops moved on, Waterford frequently found itself in the path of notorious Confederate guerrilla John Singleton Mosby.

The village fared little better with the Union, which in January 1864 enforced a blockade along the Potomac to prevent smuggling into the Confederacy. The unfortunate byproduct was that it also prevented necessities from reaching Waterford.

Adding to the misery was the constant flux of occupation. “It just went on and on here—there was never a lull,” Souders says. “There were severe economic privations, and there were constantly troops from one side or the other. We don’t know exactly how many times Waterford changed hands—it was sometimes more than once a day.”

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