Patrick County

By Thomas D. Perry

From 1790 until today, continuity in Patrick County, Virginia, has involved a rural agricultural life based on family and religion. In the history of the county named for Patrick Henry, the population has only doubled since the Civil War, when men such as cavalryman James Ewell Brown Jeb Stuart hailed from the county.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: May 18, 2009
• ISBN: 9781439637982

Thomas D. Perry

Thomas D. Perry grew up in Patrick County�s most historic community of Ararat. He attended Patrick County High School and, in 1983, graduated from Virginia Tech. Perry founded the J. E. B. Stuart Birthplace Preservation Trust, Inc., in 1990. The nonprofit organization has preserved 75 acres of the Stuart property, including the house site where James Ewell Brown Stuart was born on February 6, 1833. Tom is the author of Ascent to Glory: The Genealogy of J. E. B. Stuart; The Free State of Patrick: Patrick County, Virginia, in the Civil War; and Stuart�s Birthplace: The History of the Laurel Hill Farm. Perry produces a monthly e-mail newsletter about regional history from his Web site, www.freestateofpatrick.com.

Book preview

noted.

INTRODUCTION

Then and Now: Patrick County shows life along the four rivers dividing the county and this book into four chapters. These four streams begin their journey to the waters of the Atlantic Ocean in Patrick County, Virginia. Three of them—the Dan, Mayo, and Smith—join becoming the Dan River, which flows via the Roanoke River into the Albemarle Sound in North Carolina. The other, a river called Ararat, begins behind Bell Spur Church at the intersection of Squirrel Spur and Bell Spur Roads. Receiving its name from the story of Noah in the Bible, the stream flows into North Carolina, joining the Yadkin River and then the Pee Dee River before emptying into the Atlantic Ocean near Georgetown, South Carolina.

With a population of nearly 20,000, Patrick County is only twice the size it was in 1860 before the Civil War erupted, when it sent over 1,700 men, including the renowned J. E. B. Stuart and the locally known Rufus James Woolwine, to fight mainly for the South. Continuing the bucolic agricultural life, the county saw a boom in textiles in the mid-20th century only to face downsizing and outsourcing of jobs with the beginning of the new millennium.

The Blue Ridge Parkway brings tourism to the county. Midwife Orlean Hawks Puckett, in a cabin preserved by the National Park Service along the scenic highway, birthed a thousand children in her 90 years. One of the children she welcomed into the world was Presbyterian reverend Robert Childress, made famous in the book The Man Who Moved a Mountain. His ministry lives on in the six rock churches he constructed near the Blue Ridge Parkway. These two and J. E. B. Stuart all came from Ararat, Virginia, in the southwest part of Patrick County. Another famous person from the county is Richard Joshua Reynolds, who grew up along the waters of the Mayo River in the eastern part of the county.

From Charity in the northeast to Willis Gap in the southwest and from Penn’s Store in the east to Claudville in the west, Patrick County is half mountain and half rolling piedmont. Rufus J. Woolwine gave his name to the community along the Smith River, which is crossed by two of the seven remaining covered bridges in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Along the waters of the Smith, another Virginia governor, Gerald Baliles, closed the circle begun with the first governor of Virginia, Patrick Henry, for whom the county is named.

CHAPTER 1

ALONG THE ARARAT RIVER

All politics are local, even when former president of the United States Harry S Truman visits. Truman once said, There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know. Perhaps George E. Shug Brown is telling the man from Missouri something about J. E. B. Stuart in