The Orion Anderson Story

Between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. on November 8, 1889, 14-year-old African-American boy Orion Anderson was lynched at the Leesburg freight depot along the Washington and Old Dominion Railroad after being taken from the Leesburg jail by a mob of twenty five to forty men before his case could be heard. A week earlier, he had been arrested on circumstantial evidence after being accused of scaring 14-year-old May Leith in Hamilton by chasing her with a guano sack over his head, although she could not identify him. On November 7, 1889, the sheriff had delivered summonses for the girl and two other witnesses to appear before the court, but less than 24 hours later men entered the jail under the pretense of delivering a prisoner, overpowered the deputy sheriff, dragged Anderson down Church Street to the freight depot, hanged him from a derrick, and shot him in the head and chest. The Richmond Dispatch reported on November 9 that the attackers were disguised and had wrapped cloth around their horses' hoofs to silence them, tactics closely associated with the newly emerged Ku Klux Klan. Anderson was survived by his parents, Thomas and Charlotte Anderson, and nine brothers and sisters, and he was buried a half-mile east at Potter's Field. No one was ever convicted of his murder. His killing was one of three documented lynchings in Loudoun County between 1880 and 1902, part of the Jim Crow era use of vigilante violence to terrorize and oppress the African-American community.

Leesburg, Virginia · United States