James Ewell Brown Stuart was born on February 6, 1833, at his parents’ home, Laurel Hill, the seventh of eleven children and the youngest son born to Archibald and Elizabeth Letcher Pannill Stuart that survived. Young James lived here until 1845, when he traveled across the mountains to Wytheville to attend school. Three years later, he entered Emory and Henry College for two years. In 1850, he was appointed to the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. Stuart graduated in 1854, thirteenth in his class of forty-six.
While at West Point, Stuart wrote of his feelings for Laurel Hill, “Although everyone deems his own home, ‘A spot supremely blest, A dearer, sweeter spot than all the rest’, Yet experience has taught me that it is necessary to be deprived of it awhile in order to appreciate it properly. I might have rambled over the dear old hills of Patrick amid all the pleasures of a mountain home for a lifetime.”
Over the next seven years, he would serve in the mounted arm of the United States Army in Texas with the Mounted Rifles and then in the First United States Cavalry in the Kansas Territory. He rose to the rank of Captain when he resigned in 1861 to join the forces of Virginia and then the Confederate States of America. Stuart married Flora Cooke in 1855, and they had three children who survived. Two of them went on to have children of their own.
While in the service of the United States Army, he wrote his mother about giving one hundred dollars, which he hoped she would match for the building of a log church near Laurel Hill. It speaks volumes that, despite being over a thousand miles away, he would be interested in a “respectable free church” in Patrick County. When she sold the property in 1859, she set aside an acre for a church as her son requested.
With the firing on Fort Sumter and President Abraham Lincoln calling for troops to put down the “rebellion,” Virginia seceded from the Union. Stuart, like many other Southerners, resigned his commission to fight with his state. He served in every major battle in the eastern theater of the war from 1861 until he died in 1864.
Stuart is remembered for his reconnaissance, gathering information on the movements and dispositions of the Yankee forces. His raids were known for completely riding around the Union army three times, beginning in June 1862 around Richmond.
In the summer of 1863, Stuart’s most significant moment as a soldier would be when he took command of the wounded “Stonewall” Jackson during the battle of Chancellorsville, leading the second corps of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia to victory. A month later, Stuart commanded during the largest cavalry battle of the Civil War at Brandy Station. The most controversial time of Stuart’s military career would occur immediately afterwards with the Gettysburg campaign.
In a letter purchased by the Virginia Historical Society, Jeb Stuart wrote his brother William Alexander in December 1863, “If I should survive this war, I desire to settle down on a farm…I am very partial to the old homestead at Patrick. I wonder if it could be bought?”
Laurel Hill is located in the far southwestern part of Patrick County in Ararat, Virginia, on the dividing line between the piedmont and the mountains and within sight of the boundary line of North Carolina and Virginia. The 75-acre site, owned by the non-profit J.E.B. Stuart Birthplace Preservation Trust, is open to the public for walking tours and annual events, including a Civil War encampment in the fall during the first weekend in October. This year, it is October 4.
In 1998, the “Old Dominion” placed Laurel Hill on the Virginia Landmark Register, followed in 1999 by its inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places. In 2000, the Virginia Historical Highway Marker replaced the 1932 marker. Both markers are now on the property.
Ironically, like “Jeb” Stuart, his great-grandfather, William Letcher, lost his life fighting for his country’s independence while still in his early thirties. When the pro-British or Tories, as they were known, picked Letcher out as a target and killed him in August 1780. Letcher is buried there on the Laurel Hill property in the oldest marked grave in Patrick County. If J. E. B. Stuart came back to Laurel Hill, the only thing he would recognize would be the grave of his great-grandfather.
Confederate Major General Jeb Stuart told his brother William Alexander, “I would give anything to make a pilgrimage to the old place, and when the war is over quietly to spend the rest of my days there.” Stuart’s love of Laurel Hill lasted his entire life.
