British victory in the Revolution required one thing above all: the ability of American Loyalists to retake and hold the civil and military functions of government. Then as now, occupying armies are expensive and cannot stay forever. In this light, a battle between Tories and Patriots involving no Redcoats, Hessians, or even Continentals, towers in importance — not because of casualty counts or territory gained or lost, but as a test of the basic requirement for ultimate British success. By 1780, the British had basically given up on holding the North. With a negotiated settlement increasingly likely, what mattered now was demonstrating civil and military control of the southern colonies. The British knew that holding two or three coastal cities wasn’t going to cut it. They had to control the backcountry.

​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 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 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.

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.