DAN KEGLEY -- Staff, Smyth County News, Wednesday, April 4, 2007
If he is
remembered at all outside historians’ circles, Judge James Ewell Brown of
Wytheville may be known mainly as the former resident of a still-standing
stately home on Pepper’s Ferry Road east of the town. The home, Cobbler
Springs, only recently has been dwarfed by the nearby sprawling Gatorade
plant.
In at least the
generation that followed him, Judge Brown loomed large as a model of
character. He could not know that late in their lives his influence would
still be felt by his nephews who still spoke of him with reverence.
And the judge did not live long
enough to know his would become one of the best-known names in the
Confederacy if not the entire Civil War era. James Ewell Brown Stuart,
better known as J. E. B. ., carried his uncle’s name into history as be became a
cavalryman, a general, and one of the revered figures of the Confederacy,
That’s just one
of the tidbits of history Tom Perry is preserving and making known again in
the region.
Perry has written and
self-published three books on the Late Unpleasantness, Ascent To Glory:
The Genealogy of J. E. B. Stuart, The Free State of Patrick: Patrick County
Virginia in the Civil War, and the latest, Stuart’s Birthplace: The
History of the Laurel Hill Farm.
Stuart’s
Birthplace is Perry’s latest effort to ensure more than 140 years later
that Southwest Virginia people know the local chapters in the story of J. E.
B. Stuart’s life.
Perry grew up in
Stuart’s footsteps in Ararat in Patrick County where at age nine or 10, he
became interested in a road marker identifying Stuart’s birthplace. His
parents took him to visit the Brown family, who owned the home.
“They had a
picture of Jeb Stuart on an end table like he was a member of the family,”
Perry recalls.
The rest for Perry really is
history. He was hooked, and his studies of the past, he said, became an
escape. He earned a bachelor of arts degree at Virginia Tech, studying under
famed Civil War historian Dr. James Robertson. Earning a living in contract
computer work, Perry has time to pursue his lifelong passion, even taking
time on a recent Wednesday morning to visit Wytheville to talk about his new
book.
“I do the
history because I love it,” said Perry, tall, youthful, and eloquent in
sharing his encyclopedic knowledge of the War Between the States. He could
be a professor in his own right, and does accept 50-75 speaking engagements
each year.
In 1986 Emory Thomas published the
last major Stuart biography, Bold Dragoon, which followed by almost
three decades Burke Davis’s The Last Cavalier. The Thomas book
reminded Perry that Stuart “was a big deal,” and that “maybe we should do
something” about the man and his place in history.
Perry began his
own research on Stuart, though not with a plan to write a book. He founded
the non-profit J. E. B. Stuart Birthplace Preservation Trust Inc. in 1990,
preserving 75 acres of the Stuart property including the house site, Laurel
Hill, where Stuart was born on Feb. 6, 1833.
Perry wrote the
text of eight interpretive signs about Laurel Hill's history along with the
Virginia Civil War Trails sign and a Virginia Department of Historic
Resources highway marker in 2002. He continues his work there as the
Emeritus Board Member, producing the Laurel Hill Teacher's Guide for
educators and the Laurel Hill Reference Guide. He traveled the
country looking for Stuart materials, visiting nearly every place Stuart
served in the United States Army (1854-1861).
It was much later, on realizing the
volume of material he had collected, that his thoughts turned to compiling a
book about Stuart. Of particular interest in Smyth , Washington and Wythe
counties are chapters that discuss Stuart’s years in Southwest Virginia .
Young J. E. B. .
Stuart spent about three years, 1845-48, in Wytheville, a place to which he
maintained connections. He took singing lessons in Wytheville, and had a
band, according to Perry.
“He had a
bluegrass band before bluegrass was cool,” Perry said. That would be way
before – bluegrass would come a century after, but as a direct offspring
from, the traditional music of Stuart’s day.
Later, Perry
said, Stuart talked about raising men for the war effort from the town.
During his Wytheville years he spent some time in Draper’s Valley, and
attended Emory & Henry College. “He was a son of Southwest Virginia . He
spent a little time everywhere,” Perry said.
As with many who
gain celebrity, Stuart had hangers-on, those who would later claim to have
known the boy, Perry said. One of the more verifiable of these claims was
made by David French Boyd of Wytheville who later wrote a manuscript
recounting Stuart’s boyhood escapades.
After Ellen
Spiller – that’s certainly a prominent Wytheville surname – broke Boyd’s
heart, he went to Louisiana and worked at a boys’ school whose headmaster
was none other than William T. Sherman. Yes, "that William T.
Sherman,” Perry said, who gained notoriety late in the war for destroying
civilian targets as well as military as a means to defeating the
Confederacy.
Perry said the
boys’ school became Louisiana State University where Boyd Hall exists today.
LSU holds Boyd’s manuscript, Perry
said, and in its margins one find the editorial comments of Flora Cook
Stuart, J. E. B.’s widow, made because Boyd asked her to comment on his
writing.
Flora, Saltville residents know,
taught there in a cabin that still stands on Smokey Row.
J. E. B.’s
brother William figures prominently in Perry’s book, having earned the
author’s respect for making and upholding a promise to J. E. B. to look
after J. E. B’s. family should he die.
“He promised J.
E. B. that as long as he lived his family would be taken care of,” Perry
said. “William is the hero of the story. The martyr gets the history written
about him but William kept the family together,” taking in mother Elizabeth,
sister Mary and sister-in-law Flora while running the Saltworks in
Saltville.
J. E. B. and
William’s brother John Dabney Stuart lived in Wytheville after the war, and
was a surgeon in the 54th Virginia Infantry. With J. E. B. a
major general, William a salt maker and John a surgeon, the brother
constituted “a three-man Confederate effort,” Perry said.
William built
Oak Level, now called Loretto, in Wytheville. William executed J. E. B.’s
will which is filed in the Wythe County courthouse. Perry noted that fact
is a point of pride for Wytheville’s historians, but “people from Stuart
probably don’t like that J. E. B.’s will is in the courthouse here,” Perry
said, instead of in the seat of Patrick County , where Stuart was born.
The general died
in May 1864 a day after being wounded at Yellow Tavern, having set up a
block to Union General Phillip Sheridan’s march on Richmond .
John Stuart’s
grave lies within sight of his brother’s Oak Level in a Wytheville cemetery
from which the historic town can be surveyed. North lies Queen’s Knob at
whose feet the Battle of the Cove clattered and boomed. West lies Tazewell
Street, down which Union General John Toland, until he was reportedly shot
dead from a home’s upstairs window, led forces on route to ruin the railroad
south of town.
On this
Wednesday morning the countryside was shrouded in mist and fog, the present
appearing hazy and vague as does history for many. For Perry though, it’s as
vivid as a photo on an end table.
“There’s just so
must history here,” he said, his gaze wandering the town and then shifting
to the horizon, seeing not only what is there but what has gone before,
knowing intimately if not personally figures of history who left legacies on
the landscape.
PROGRAMS PRESENTLY BEING GIVEN BY TOM PERRY
"If Thee
Must Fight, Then Fight Well" The Life of Brevet Brigadier General William
Jackson Palmer
J. E. B. Stuart’s Long Ride To Yellow Tavern
A Tale Of Two Great-Grandfathers: J. E. B.
Stuart's Ancestors In The American Revolution
"The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" George
Stoneman's 1865 Raid Through Virginia and North Carolina
The Free State Of Patrick: Patrick County
Virginia In The Civil War
Copyright 2007 Tom Perry. No material to be used without permission.
