1932 Virginia Historic Highway Marker on display in Martinsville.

Stuart’s Birthplace: A Marker And A Personal History

                In December 1932, the Commonwealth of Virginia placed a Historical Highway Marker at the farm of George Elbert “Sug (pronounced Shug)” and Icy Bowman Brown along Highway 773, now the Ararat Highway in Ararat, Patrick County, Virginia, to commemorate the birthplace of James Ewell Brown “Jeb” Stuart. Three hundred miles away in Georgia, my mother, Betty Jane Hobbs Perry, was six months old, and thirty-seven years later, she would take me to the farm and leave me with Icy and Sug. It changed my life.

                The Virginia Historical Highway Marker, I believe, was written by Pulitzer Prize winning biographer of Robert E. Lee and George Washington and historian of the Army of Northern Virginia, Douglas Southall Freeman. “A short distance west is the site of the home of Archibald Stuart Jr., a statesman of a century ago There was born, February 6, 1883, his son, James Ewell Brown Stuart, who became Major General commanding the cavalry of the Army of Northern Virginia and whose fame is a part of the history of that army. Stuart closed his career by falling in the defense of Richmond, May 11, 1864.”

                My mother told me when I was about nine or ten years ago that I became obsessed with the Virginia Historical Highway Marker. She encouraged my interest in history, buying me books and taking me to historical sites, while my mother was playing golf on weekends. She said she left me with Icy and Sug Brown hoping to quench the thirst I had for the history in my neighborhood. She created a monster.

                That day and many days afterwards, I would spend time with Sug and Icy soaking up all they could tell me about the farm and the history it contained. Icy kept scrapbooks full of information about this history. One interesting tidbit, she documented in her scrapbooks was the fact that the Stuart family moved Archibald Stuart, who died in 1855, to Elizabeth Cemetery in Saltville, Virginia, to lay beside his wife, Elizabeth Letcher Pannill Stuart. I have never seen any documentation anywhere else about the move.

                Spending time with Sug Brown was a different animal entirely. He lived on the Laurel Hill Farm his entire life and remembered many things about the site. He walked me around and told me where he remembered things were located on the farm, such as the location of Archibald Stuart’s grave. After archaeology was completed by the College of William and Mary in the 19090s, Brown was proved right 100% on what he told me. I was lucky to have had access to them the Browns and to learn from them as they lived on the farm where J. E. B. Stuart was born and grew up.

                In 1988, I went public with my idea to preserve part of the Laurel Hill Farm with an article in the Winston-Salem Journal. Two years later, with members of the local Civil War Round Table, we formed the 501c3 non-profit corporation called the J. E. B. Stuart Birthplace Preservation Trust, Inc. In 1991, we raised the money to purchase 60 acres of the farm.  Today, seventy-five acres are preserved on both sides of the Ararat River including the grave of William Letcher, J. E. B. Stuart’s great-grandfather, who lost his life to Tories, pro-British sympathizers, during the American Revolution. The site is open dawn to dusk every day and interpreted with multiple signs about the history of the site that is on the Virginia and National Registers of Historic Places.

                In 2001, I wrote the new text for the Virginia Historical Highway Marker that replaced the 1932 marker that stirred my interest in history. I tried to get the original sign, but was ignored by the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. I thought the marker was destroyed, but it landed in a warehouse in Roanoke, Virginia. The regional office of the VDHR cleared out its warehouse several years later and tried to contact the J. E. B. Stuart Birthplace about the sign, but received no reply. At this time, I have not been part of the organization I started in over a decade. One of the staff of VDHR contacted Gerald Via of Roanoke and asked him if he had any interest in the marker. He told them he did not, but he knew someone who did. My friend, Gerald Via, called me up and asked me to bring my truck to his brother’s garage in Floyd County, Virginia, where he gave me the sign. I placed it on display in the Martinsville Henry County Courthouse Museum in Martinsville thanks to my friend, Debbie Hall. The sign is now in my personal possession.

                J. E. B. Stuart was born 187 years ago today, and the site of his birth is the only place in the nation that remembers him and his family history. A granite marker graces the base of the flagpole near the house site honoring my parents and their contribution. I want no recognition at the site because every time I drive by it on my way to my parents, I see the new marker that I wrote, and I know that I helped save the site.