Juneteenth March in Leesburg

Loudoun County officially celebrated the nation’s newest federal holiday—Juneteenth—with a march in downtown Leesburg organized by the NAACP and Loudoun Freedom Center.

Juneteenth commemorates the end of slavery and the date the news of the Emancipation Proclamation reached the remote city of Galveston, Texas. On June 19, 1865, Major General Gordon Granger led Union soldiers into the city, bringing news that the Emancipation Proclamation. which freed all enslaved people, had been signed two and a half years earlier and the Civil War had ended two and half months before, on April 9, 1865.

In Leesburg, approximately 150 marchers gathered at 9 a.m. on the Loudoun County Courthouse lawn and proceeded from the courthouse on East Market Street to the Orion Anderson Memorial in Raflo Park, located along the W&OD Trail and Harrison Street.

The memorial is named for Hamilton resident Orion Anderson who, in 1889, allegedly played a joke on his neighbor and scared her. For this, the 14-year-old was put in jail. While awaiting trial, a mob broke into the jail and hanged him.