Two articles
from The New York Times: April 12, 1879 and October 16, 1879 discuss the most
famous court case held in the Patrick County Courthouse. The Patrick County
Courthouse joined the Virginia Landmarks Register on September 17, 1974, and
the National Register of Historic Places on December 27, 1974. Patrick County
came into existence on June 1, 1791. Twelve days later, the first court met at
the home of Jonathan Hanby. Partitioned from Henry County in 1790, Patrick
County included 458 square miles. Later land was lost to Franklin, Grayson and
Carroll counties.
In 1792,
Eliphaz Shelton donated ten acres including the land where the Patrick County
Courthouse now sits. In April 1793, the “Gentlemen Justices” of Patrick County
authorized the construction of the building. The structure was to be thirty-six
feet long and twenty-four feet wide with two twelve foot jury rooms heated by
fireplaces with plastered walls and eighteen “lights” of glass in the windows.
Contractor Charles Vest completed his work before the deadline and the
courthouse opened for court in October 1794. For the next twenty-five years,
that building served the county.
In 1819,
the county authorized a new building, but two years passed before construction
began. Abram Staples, one of the justices, built the new courthouse had the new
structure ready one year and one month later on July 11, 1822. Four major
renovations have occurred since 1822. In 1928, saw the Sheriff’s Office and
jail added. Remodeling occurred in 1936 and 1972. In 1982, another renovation
began to relocate the General District Court, Juvenile and Domestic Court
Relations Court, the Circuit Court Judge’s secretary and to add space for the
Patrick County Clerk of Court’s office.
The
building is of Roman Revival or Jeffersonian Neo-Classic in style and made of
red brick with a “central three bay blocks and two flanking wings.” There are
four Tuscan columns and a large stairway leading from the ground to the
portico. This reflects the “high basements” of the Roman Revival. There is a
small bell tower and semi-circular opening in the pediment of the portico. The
doorway on the portico probably comes from the 1928 renovation.
The county
seat named Taylorsville for George Taylor, a hero of the American Revolution,
but throughout the history of the county the site of government was Patrick
Court House. In 1884, the town was renamed Stuart in honor of Civil War General
James Ewell Brown Stuart, who was born and raised in Ararat. J. E. B. Stuart’s
father Archibald Stuart served as Commonwealth’s Attorney of Patrick County.
The most famous court case held in
the building occurred in January 1878 as part of Ex Parte Virginia. Burwell Reynolds age
nineteen and Lee age seventeen were children of Kitty Reynolds. On November 29,
1877, at the end of Reconstruction after the Civil War the Reynolds brothers
got into a fight with the white brothers Green and Aaron Shelton near the
present day site of the Patrick County Schools bus maintenance garage. The
cause of the altercation was verbal harassment by the Shelton boys directed at
a school for former slaves at the site overlooking Campbell’s Branch.
Aaron Shelton knocked Lee Reynolds over a log near the road and Burwell
stabbed the former with a knife resulting in Shelton’s death the next day. In
April 1878, Patrick County tried the two Reynolds brothers separately. Judge
William Treadway presided and with all white juries even though attorneys for
the brothers Andrew M. Lybrook and William Martin asked the juries to be one
third black. The court found Burwell guilty of first degree murder after a
second trial. Lee received an eighteen-year sentence for second-degree murder
after a second trial. The attorneys petitioned Judge Alexander Rives of the
Federal District of Western Virginia to move the cases to federal court because
the state court denied the defendant’s rights due to a lack of blacks on the
juries and they could not receive a fair trial in Patrick County due to their
race.
On November 18, 1878, Deputy U. S. Marshall O. R. Wooten arrived in
Stuart to take the Reynolds brothers under his protection. This set off a chain
of events that ended up in the U.S. Supreme Court. Editorials in newspaper and
Resolutions in the Virginia General Assembly said Judge Rives actions were a
"Federal usurpation of power" and "unwarranted by the
Constitution." Virginia’s Attorney General asked Congress to pass
legislation to prevent Federal courts from "usurping" the power of
state courts. Newspapers as far away as Baltimore and New York commented on the
case that began as a senseless killing in Patrick County.
Judge Rives responded by calling two grand juries that included black men
that eventually indicted judges in Amherst, Appomattox, Bedford, Botetourt,
Buckingham, Campbell, Charlotte, Franklin, Fluvanna, Halifax, Henry, Nelson and
Roanoke counties including Judge James D. Coles of Pittsylvania County and
Judge Samuel G. Staples of Patrick County for excluding African-Americans from
juries violating the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and the Fourteenth Amendment to
the United States Constitution, which guaranteed "equal protection of the
law."
Of all the judges arrested only Judge James Doddridge Coles of
Pittsylvania County refused bail and petitioned the U. S. Supreme Court for a
writ of habeas corpus claiming he had not violated any law becoming a case
forever known as Ex Parte Virginia. On March 15, 1880, the Supreme Court denied
the petition, thus upholding Judge Rives actions as part of decisions on three
separate cases commonly referred to as "The Civil Rights Cases" that
set precedents for the protection of rights for the former slaves. The
courthouse in Chatham received National Landmark status in 1987 due to this
case instead of Patrick mainly because the National Park Service did not dig
deep enough to find the roots of the case were in Patrick County.
Further information can be found in the writings of Herman Melton’s
Pittsylvania County’s Historic Courthouse: The Story Behind Ex Parte Virginia
and "Thirty-Nine Lashes-Well Laid
On:" Crime and Punishment in Southside Virginia 1750-1950. Burwell
Reynolds received a sentence of five years for manslaughter for killing Aaron
Shelton. Patrick County did not prosecute Lee Reynolds and released him.
In the kitchen of the Reynolds
Homestead hangs a picture of Kitty Reynolds, the slave that traditions says
saved the life of Hardin Reynolds. She distracted a raging bull along enough
for the father of R. J. to escape danger, but it as a mother than she should be
more famous.
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