By Tom Perry
“If you seek his monument look around.”
“Call the shapes from the mist, Call the dead men out of the mist and watch them ride…Of a horseman born. It is Stuart of Laurel Hill. With these words of Stephen Vincent Benet in his epic poem of the Civil War, “John Brown’s Body,” wrote of Patrick County’s own. Today would have been the 193rd birthday of James Ewell Brown “Jeb” Stuart, who was born in Ararat, Virginia, at his parents’ home, Laurel Hill.
H. B. McClellan wrote in his biography of General Stuart that the family quoted him as saying, “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.” Laurel Hill is the only preserved site relating specifically to the life of James Ewell Brown Stuart. It is open from dawn to dusk every day for you to make a “pilgrimage.”
McClellan wrote, “She (Elizabeth Letcher Pannill Stuart) inherited from her grandfather a house that was surrounded by native oaks and was beautified with a flower garden, which was one of the childish delights of her son James…The site commanded a fine view of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and near at hand was the monument erected to the memory of William Letcher by his daughter Bethenia…Amid these surroundings, James Stuart passed a happy boyhood. He loved the old homestead with all the enthusiasm of his nature, and one of the fondest dreams of his manhood was that he might own the place of his birth, and there end his days in quiet retirement.”
It was here on February 6, 1833, at 11 a.m., that Elizabeth Letcher Pannill Stuart gave birth to a boy she and her husband, Archibald Stuart, named James Ewell Brown Stuart after his paternal uncle from Wytheville, Virginia, who married Archibald’s sister.
Imagine Laurel Hill in 1842, when a large white frame house sat on this hill, offering a breathtaking vista of the Blue Ridge Mountains. You would find a white family, the Stuarts, with eleven children, who were still living here. There are nearly thirty people of African descent living here in slavery, growing grains and livestock on 1500 acres along the Ararat River.
It was here that young James Stuart would ride his first horse, pick his first flower, read his first book, and in 1842, fight his first battle. The enemy that day was a particularly stubborn group of hornets, as told by his older brother, William Alexander, and depicted in a watercolor by artist Pat Gwyn Woltz, available for purchase from the J. E. B. Stuart Birthplace Preservation Trust. www.jebstuart.org.
James Stuart left here in 1845 to attend school in Wytheville, then on to Emory and Henry College in 1848. From the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, he wrote of Laurel Hill, saying, “Everyone deems his home a spot serenely blest, a dearer, sweeter spot than all the rest, yet experience has taught me that it is necessary to be deprived of it for a while in order to appreciate it properly. I might have rambled the dear old hills of Patrick amid all the pleasures of a mountain home for a lifetime.”
During his seven years of service in the United States Army, he wrote his mother, “I wish to devote one hundred dollars to the purchase of a comfortable log church near your place, because in all my observation I believe one is more needed in that neighborhood than any other that I know of…. What will you take for the south half of your plantation? I want to buy it.”
The winds of war would make him famous, but he still thought of his birthplace. In December 1863, Major General James Ewell Brown Stuart wrote to his brother William Alexander Stuart, “If I should survive this war, I desire to settle down on a farm if I can get one to suit me and devote my after life to agricultural pursuits; Flora now seems as anxious for this as myself. I am very partial to the old homestead at Patrick. I wonder if it could be bought?”
He did not live to return to Laurel Hill, and the farm passed out of the Stuart family forever. The Galloways, Hollingsworths, Taylors, Hatchers, Jarrells, Mitchells, and others lived on the 1500 acres the Stuarts owned.
Early one fall day before the First World War, a young man walked out of his father’s house up on the hill across the road on the site where Eric and Amy Brown Sawyers live today. He was on his way to the J. E. B. Stuart School. He could see the grave of Archibald Stuart and two others up on the hill near where the Stuart home once stood. It burned in the winter of 1848. The young man passed down the road, noting the rhododendron, the mountain laurel that gave the farm its name. He saw wild roses and the running cedar. He crossed a river named Ararat and up through the bottom by the William Letcher grave, J. E. B. Stuart’s great-grandfather, who died at Laurel Hill during the American Revolution, and up the opposing hill, known locally as Rabbit Ridge, to the wooden schoolhouse. As he passed through the door, he could not help but notice the sign above it that read “Jeb Stuart School.” George Elbert “Shug” Brown no doubt smiled and noted, with pride, the first of many times his family owned the land.
“Shug” Brown married Icy Bowman, and they had one son, Bowman. They lived and worked on this farm known as Laurel Hill. Across the river, the Dellenback family owned the bottomland that had once belonged to the Stuarts. In 1932, Virginia placed a Historical Marker here, written by Douglas Southall Freeman, the Pulitzer-winning biographer of George Washington and Robert E. Lee. For many years, it was all that alerted visitors to the significance of Laurel Hill.
If you visited “Shug” and Icy to ask about Laurel Hill, you would be given an introduction by viewing scrapbooks collected by Icy and a walking tour by “Shug.” When you were just about to leave, they would walk into their closet and hand you a brick they believed came from the house where Jeb Stuart was born. Mr. Brown always said, “If this place were between Stuart and Martinsville, it would be a national park by now.”
In the 1970s, an attempt was made to preserve this site. Plans were drawn up. Fundraising attempts were made locally. The next notice of preserving this site came in 1988 when the Winston-Salem Journal did a story in its Surry Scene section about Laurel Hill. Joe Bill and Edith Brown were willing to sign an option to give a group of Civil War buffs the opportunity to purchase and preserve this farm, mainly because that is what their aunt and uncle would have wanted.
Much has happened since 1990. Archaeological work has found the house site and the other sites noted by the interpretive signs. Laurel Hill is now on the Virginia and National Registers of Historic Places. Several symposia have been held along with thirteen Civil War encampments. In 2002, a Civil War Trails sign was placed here connecting Laurel Hill to over 200 sites across the Old Dominion. Multiple interpretive signs have been placed here telling the many histories of Laurel Hill. Thanks to Ronnie Haynes, President of the J. E. B. Stuart Birthplace Preservation Trust, the Letcher grave is restored to its original condition. In 2001, a new Virginia Historical Marker was placed along the road, along with five interpretive signs telling the story of J. E. B. Stuart, written by Robert J. Trout.
Jeb Stuart and his family gave us a reason to preserve this site. “Shug” and Icy Bowman Brown, along with their family and the Dellenback family, allowed us to preserve this site. I want to thank my mother for setting off the spark in me to make an effort to preserve this site. You are welcome to visit Laurel Hill and make your pilgrimage; you should seek their monument; all you have to do is look around.
