Following popular cultural trends, Mary Nunnamaker collected cartes de visite photographs in an album during the Civil War. The teenaged daughter of Edgar Nunnamaker, a Harpers Ferry armorer who had died in 1852, she lived with her widowed mother, Elizabeth, in the town where her late father had worked.
Inside the album, Mary’s name, carefully written in Gothic script on a slip of paper, is pasted on the first page above a cutout image of roses in bloom. The “Index to Portraits” page is almost entirely filled out with names of men and women, one column in pen and the other in pencil—both columns in the same hand. Mary filled out 45 entries. Most are named individuals, three are “fancy pictures,” and two mysteries: “Stranger” and “M.N.”
Of the named individuals Mary included in her album, two men, George H. Hoddinott and John William Forsyth, appear on the roll of the Loudoun Rangers, an independent cavalry company. The Rangers formed in Loudoun County, which shares a border with Jefferson County, where Mary and her mother resided.
The citizen soldiers who rode with the Rangers were composed largely of men from Quaker and German farming communities in the vicinity of Lovettsville, a town in the northern part of the county. An overwhelming majority of its citizens had voted against secession—making them an anomaly in the county.
References to the Loudoun Rangers can be found in two footnotes in Civil War history…