A Little Help for Lt. Jacob Parrot

Fallen gravestones in a Rockingham County cemetery.

​General Washington approved several judgements of a court martial at Morristown, New Jersey on May 7, 1777. Among the orders: Lt. Jacob Parrot of the 8th Virginia was “to be discharged from the service, and his pay stop’d from the time he left his detachment, until he did duty in his regiment again.” In modern terms, he had been AWOL and was fired for it. Today his broken gravestone sits off to the side of a Rockingham County, Virginia cemetery in a collection of about fifteen stones that have also succumbed to age.

The Parrot family were, according to genealogies, among the earliest German-speaking settlers of the Shenandoah Valley in 1734. They are believed to have been Swiss, which would make Jacob and his brothers Joseph and George three of several Swiss-descended soldiers in the 8th Virginia, alongside Chaplain Christian Streit, Lt. Jacob Rinker, and private soldier Joachim Fetzer. The name was originally spelled "Parett" or possibly "Barrett."

​Jacob’s first Revolutionary service was in the Dunmore Independent Company of volunteers in 1775. In the period before open war, Virginia’s leaders were not yet ready to raise regular troops or engage the militia against the Crown. County committees of safety, however, were encouraged to organize volunteer companies to support the committees’ work and to enforce the Articles of Association. Dunmore County is now Shenandoah County and parts of Page and Warren counties. The Dunmore Independents were called out in April of 1775 to respond to Gov. Lord Dunmore’s seizure of gunpowder from the magazine in Williamsburg, but returned home when word was received of a peaceful resolution.

​When the 8th Virginia was formed early in 1776, Jacob earned a commission as an ensign in Jonathan Clark’s Company. His brother Joseph signed on as a sergeant. George Parrot enlisted as a private soldier. They traveled to Suffolk, Virginia where they countered efforts by slaves, servants, and Tories to aid and reenforce Lord Dunmore ‘floating city’ of soldiers and Tory refugees in Hampton Roads. They were then taken south to oppose the British attack on Sullivan’s Island and then a futile effort to attack St. Augustine, Florida. Malaria took many lives and resulted in the scattering of the 8th Virginia’s men as large numbers of sick men were left behind in various places. The survivors hobbled back to Virginia in the winter, marched to Philadelphia for smallpox inoculations, and then reunited in New Jersey in April and May.

The grave of Lt. Jacob Parrot has a broke base and has been removed from the ground. The 200-year-old marker appears to have been made by an amateur craftsman and is now barely legible.

What Lieutenant Parrot did when he "left his detachment" is not clear, though the term "detachment" hints that it happened before the regiment was united in the spring of 1777. A fair guess is that he went home sick from the south without permission. After the ignominious end to his military service, he returned to the Shenandoah Valley and remained there until his death in 1829. He is buried next to his wife in a small cemetery northwest of Harrisonburg, several miles south of his old home in Shenandoah County. Though the stones match, it should be noted that one genealogy states that Jacob was never married.

Angled into the light of a low sun, the inscription on Parrot's headstone is legible.

The very first Civil War Medal of Honor recipient was Jacob's namesake and great-great nephew. The later Jacob Parrott (1843-1908) was the grandson of John Parrot, an elder brother of the 8th Virginia veteran. He enlisted as a private in the Union Army from Ohio in 1861 and volunteered to participate in the Great Locomotive Chase of 1862. He was captured but exchanged and awarded the Medal of Honor by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton on March 25, 1863. He was taken to meet President Abraham Lincoln and promoted from private to lieutenant. His exploits were the basis of Buster Keaton's most famous film, "The General," which is named for the train.

Pat Kelly lives on the east side of the Blue Ridge in Albemarle County, about thirty miles south of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and more than an hour southeast of Jacob Parrot’s resting place. He descends from Jacob’s brother John, making him a 7th great-nephew. He grew up in East Tennessee (where his ancestor founded Parrottsville), but moved to Virginia in 1978 when he retired from the Navy. He has several Revolutionary War ancestors and has been researching Henry to see if he also fought in the war. Henry is listed in the Capt. John Tipton's company of  activated Dunmore County Militia during Lord Dunmore’s War (1774), but he was not in the 8th Virginia and further service has not yet been demonstrated.

Pat traveled up to Singer’s Glen to look for Jacob’s grave and to see if he might find Henry’s there too. Neither could be found. Henry may or may not be buried there, but Jacob is definitely there and the absence of his marker was alarming. Of the more than 900 men who served at any time in the 8th Virginia, only 53 have identifiable marked graves. Of those, only twelve to fifteen still have their original headstones. Twelve or fifteen of 900 is a tiny fraction, but Jacob’s can be narrowed down to a category of just two. His and Capt. John Stephenson’s headstones both appear to be “home made” or "primitive" stones. A professionally-cut and engraved gravestone was beyond the economic reach of most veterans' families when they died and the majority of 8th Virginia men may have just had simple wooden crosses or planks to mark the spots where they were lowered into the ground. Though a few were given elegant and expensive markers, an unknown number were likely memorialized with hand-etched or scratched markers of varying quality. The marker put on Jacob Parrot’s grave appears to be a higher-end example of such a marker. Its disappearance would have been a terrible thing.

Jacob Parrot (1843-1908) was the first Civil War-era recipient of the Medal of Honor.

Fortunately, a search of the cemetery found his marker leaning with more than a dozen others against a concrete riser off to the side of the cemetery and not visible from the other graves. It is severely eroded, but its inscription is intact. It is broken at its base and could not be placed back in the ground in its current state. The stone for Jacob’s wife, Rachel, is still in the ground and is of identical design.
 
Though intact, Jacob’s and Rachel’s inscriptions are too eroded to be easily legible. Only a few letters can be made out in photographs taken of them in 2013. Pouring water on Jacob’s stone made it only slightly more legible. The full inscription therefore seemed to be lost before a trick of nature revealed the full wording. Very carefully turning the stone to obliquely face the light of the late afternoon sun illuminated the edges of the letters and brought them back to almost full visibility.  It reads

TO THE
MEMORY
OF
JACOB PArrIT
Departed this Life
May th[e?] 12 1829 Age[d?]
[7?]2 Years 6 mo 19 d[ays?]

The letters are carefully and somewhat formally executed, the odd mix of capital letters, the variant spelling of "Parrit," the small capital “H” in the second word, and the off-center placement of the fourth and fifth lines indicate that the marker was not made by a professional stone carver. If anything, this makes the memorial even more valuable as a relic of Jacob Parrot’s life. Someone who dearly loved him and his wife appears to have worked the stones to honor them. What at first look like scratches near the top of Jacob’s marker seem on closer inspection to be a decoration of some kind, perhaps a flower.

Yet the stone is broken and removed from his actual grave. I made several recommendations for marking Revolutionary graves in a recent essay. Because they are free, almost all Revolutionary marker replacements are now of the modern, Arlington-style type issued by the Department of Veterans Affairs. I argued that original markers are in most cases the only tangible connection we have with the warriors in the ground, and should be left in place with new markers next to them. 8th Virginia veteran James Kay’s original marker, broken the same way Parrot’s is, was placed flat in the ground next to a new marker earlier this spring. I also argued that the pre-World War I type should be used if a government marker is to be acquired.

The grave of Rachel Parrot remains firmly placed in the ground.

In Parrot’s case, it may be possible to craft a facsimile of the original stone. Then he and Rachel could continue to have matching stones as they have for two centuries. A repaired original could be reset upright at the correct angle to catch the rays of the late-day sun. Or it could be taken to the Harrisonburg-Rockingham Historical Society’s museum. At all costs, it should not disappear into someone’s garage.

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