In Their Own Words

Praise for In Their Own Words


“Waldron and Huntington have caught the rail of the past as it slips out of memory. Here they are, the
farmers, doctors, storekeepers, the men and women who were Loudoun County before it traded its lanes,
fields, cows, and orchards for SUVs and instant mansions. They remember it in their own words, and
Waldron’s spare and chiseled interviews ring in the mind. In Huntington’s portraits, they look as planted
and permanent as Mount Rushmore, but they aren’t, of course. In a sense they’re already gone, and this
quietly disturbing book is what we have left.”


Barbara Holland


“This is a gem, a marvel of its kind, the collected memories and anecdotes of Loudoun’s most venerable
old-timers. Their stories and faces reveal lives fully-lived and crows feet well-earned; all of them captured
here in the innocence of their nostalgia by portrait photographer Sarah Huntington and writer-editor Gale
Waldron.”

John Rolfe Gardiner


“In Their Own Words possesses the intimate distance of a Civil War ambrotype. Skunk-skinners, moonshiners,
milk trains, corncob fires, and five-cent kids come alive on the page. A lament for a Loudoun lost
within living memory, here beautifully regained.”


Tony Horwitz