Gentry and Common Folk by Albert H. Tillson

Author:Albert H. Tillson [Tillson, Albert H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, United States, Colonial Period (1600-1775)
ISBN: 9780813117492
Google: orzODbUcpiYC
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 1991-01-01T01:06:08+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

John Stuart’s History

of the Greenbrier Valley

By the end of the revolutionary era, many upper valley leaders recognized that the rise of republican political values had fundamentally altered their lives. For John Stuart of Greenbrier County, the shift from a deferential to a republican culture provided the underlying structure for a narrative of his county’s history. In effect, Stuart’s awareness of this transformation shaped his explanation of the world in which he lived.1 The techniques of structuralism make possible an analysis of this aspect of Stuart’s text. This chapter will first summarize Stuart’s narrative, then briefly discuss the principles of structuralism, and finally present a structuralist analysis of the text.

Both the “Memoir of Indian Wars” and its author were closely connected to the development of the Greenbrier area and the upper Valley of Virginia. Stuart played a prominent role in much of the region’s early history, and in his narrative he attempted a straightforward, comprehensive chronology of Greenbrier’s development. Yet in several important ways, Stuart’s text seems confused and disorganized as it departs from its apparent purpose of narrating the region’s history. Ultimately, this chapter will argue, these elements of confusion and disorder provide a clue to the deeper meaning of the narrative.

Stuart was born near Staunton, where his father was an important militia leader and a justice of the peace. The Stuarts were related by marriage to the influential family of John, Andrew, and Thomas Lewis. In 1769, at the age of nineteen, Stuart settled in the Greenbrier valley and soon rose to prominence, commanding a company in the Point Pleasant expedition of 1774 and holding important military offices during and after the Revolution. The first Greenbrier County Court met at his house in 1778, and he held the powerful position of county clerk for nearly three decades. Like other local leaders, Stuart maintained close social and political ties with his counterparts in the upper valley counties to the east.

The process of composing the narrative reflected Stuart’s involvement with Greenbrier County and the upper valley. In 1798 he recorded a short local history at the end of the county’s deed book. Sometime between then and his death in 1823, Stuart expanded this history into the fuller test that the Virginia Hstorical Society published in 1833. Stuart received much of his information on the colonial period from the prominent leader Andrew Lewis, and his own recollections were a major source for the discussion of the revolutionary years. Since Stuart and his friends frequently retold local historical events at informal gatherings, the narrative’s material also may have been shaped by these social interactions among the Greenbrier elite.2

The “Memoir of Indian Wars and Other Occurrences” opens with several anecdotes about the beginning of white settlement in Greenbrier. The area was first discovered by a resident of Frederick County who often wandered through the wilderness during periods of lunacy. Attracted by his reports of a land abounding with game, two other men settled there, but after a quarrel one of them moved into a hollow tree near their cabin.

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