Virginia Civil War Series, Part 3: Southwest Region

Featured image from:

Middleton, Strobridge & Co., Lithographer. View of Cumberland Gap, from the south / Middleton, Strobridge & Co., Lith. Cin. Cincinnati, Ohio: Photographed and Published by A.S. Morse, Dec. 2. Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/2013645291/>.

Resources along the Railway - Virginia’s Southwest

At the time of the Civil War, the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad, 204 miles long, was the largest of Virginia’s seventeen railways. It started at Bristol, a city on the Tennessee border, and ended at Lynchburg, where it connected to the Confederate capital of Richmond. Southwest Virginia produced a significant portion of the Confederacy’s salt and lead, and the railway was critical for transporting these resources to Richmond so that they could be distributed through the south. The qualities that made this region a Confederate asset also made it a Union target. Throughout four years of war, the Union sought to destroy the railway and the resources which enriched the southwest’s economy.

Blackford, W. W, and Ritchie & Dunnavant. Map & profile of the Virginia & Tennessee Rail Road. Richmond, lith of Ritchie & Dunnavant, 1856. Map. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/gm72003016/>.

Hunt, S. V. , -1893, Engraver, and Harry Fenn. Cumberland Gap / H. Fenn. Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/95513932/>.

The Cumberland Gap

From the war’s beginning, both Union and Confederate forces fought for control of the Cumberland Gap, the uninhabited chasm through the Cumberland Mountain which connected Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky. Both North and South saw the gap as an opportunity to claim resources from their rivals, and the gap changed occupation four times. By the summer of 1862, the Union controlled Kentucky and Tennessee, leaving Virginia to defend itself from its neighbors.

Bushwhackers, Red Strings, and Shifting Allegiances in the Mountains

The partisan views of this region set the foundation for two groups of impact: Confederate-allied bushwhackers and Union spies. Bushwhackers were the guerilla fighters and outlaws of the mountain region. In Virginia, many of these sharpshooters and bandits had Confederate views and focused their attacks on Union troops. The Red Strings, a prominent unionist intelligence organization also known as the Heroes of 1776 (HOA), reached Virginia’s southwest in 1863. Originally started in North Carolina, they “worked to bring about northern victory through spying, assisting escaped Federal prisoners, and promoting desertion in rebel ranks” (Noe, 316). They infiltrated Virginia military units, and some were prominent members of Virginian society and government. Though their presence in southwest Virginia is documented, the number of Red Strings is often inflated, and the full scope of their impact is unknown.  

The Significance of Salt in Wartime

Graham, H. S, and E Hergesheimer. Map of Virginia: showing the distribution of its slave population from the census of. Washington: Henry S. Graham, 1861. Map. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/2010586922/>.

There were three methods of salt production at the time of the Civil War: “extraction from saline water wells, boiling down sea water or water from inland salt lakes, and mining deposits of rock salt” (Whisonat, 88). Saltville, Virginia had an abundance of saline water wells, which is the most common salt production method. The town, which resided between Smyth and Washington Counties, was so significant to the economy that it had its own depot on the Virginia-Tennessee Railroad.

Salt was critical for food preservation and feeding soldiers on the move. It was also utilized to cure leather. Though the southwest region had one of the lowest slavery populations in Virginia, hundreds of enslaved labored at the salt mines among other labor-intensive industries. To accommodate the needs of wartime, Saltville increased its salt production from 250,000 bushels per year in 1861 to four million bushels per year by 1864 (Southwest Virginia). The Confederacy, recognizing the importance of Saltville to the Southern war effort, employed a Home Guard to protect the salt mines.

Salt production, as depicted in January 1865 - Harper's Weekly. AP2 .H32. Special Collections, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/9732-bf7db7eb8941ef7/

There were two battles of Saltville – October and December 1864. In the first battle, 2,000 Confederates held their ground against the Union offensive, but in the aftermath, there was a massacre of 50 black members of the 5th United States Colored Calvary. Confederate renegades pursued these soldiers, even when they were unarmed or wounded in the hospital. By the Second Battle of Saltville two months later, the Home Guard had diminished to 500, and the Union army seized and burned the salt mines.

Ellen Brown Stewart, whose husband owned and operated the salt mines, described the scene: “Toward midnight a grand illumination succeeded as the furnaces and machinery for pumping the salt water were blazing, then the depot was blown up.” She and her family were advised to evacuate Saltville. She left with her sister-in-law Flora, the widow of Confederate General Jeb Stewart, and recorded the destruction of their salt sheds, railroad tracks, and brine wells (Whisonant, 88).

Other Natural Resources: Iron and Lead

In December 1864, before the Union destroyed the salt mines at Saltville, they devastated other Confederate resources – Marion’s iron foundries and Wytheville’s lead mines. Union General George Stoneman’s raid started in Austinville then to Marion, Wytheville, and Saltville. Austinville was home to the Union Mine Company, which extracted ore, melted them into led bars, and shipped them to Richmond for ammunition production. The Staley Creek furnace in Marion produced pig iron for the Tredegar in Richmond. According to Robert C. Whisonant’s Arming the Confederacy, “the Wythe County works produced roughly one-third to perhaps 40 per cent of the estimated ten million pounds of lead used by the South in the Civil War.” Wytheville housed Barret’s Foundry, which “manufactured small cannons, cannon balls, and rifles for the Confederate armies,” as well as percussion caps.

Even after the mines, foundries, kettles, storehouses, and mills were destroyed, they sprang back into production after their demise. For the salt mines, the wells and sheds returned in a few weeks. The lead mines returned to production on March 22, 1865, just in time for the Confederate surrender on April 9, 1865.

Women in Virginia’s Southwest

In this contested area, bonds to family and community were strong. Hannah Wilson sheltered and concealed her sons, who had deserted their units. It is legend in southwest Virginia that upon hearing that the Union army was approaching Wytheville, 26-year-old Mary Tynes mounted her horse and rallied her city to defend itself. Women participated in the war effort in many ways, like Hannah and Mary. They cooked for troops and tended to the wounded. They wed soldiers, raised families, and defended their homes. They also defied traditional perceptions of what a woman should be.

As in Richmond, the women of the southwest understood their strength in numbers. A specific incident of burglary was reported in Abingdon in March 1864 (McKnight, 187). A band of them, brandished with pistols and knives, burst into a shop demanding cotton. Pitying their situation, the shopkeeper gave them the cotton for free. When another group of women attempted this, inspired by the first, their plans were thwarted, as the government was concerned it would become a trend.

When analyzing this region, it’s important to remember biases against civilians in this region, especially those recorded by Union soldiers passing through. For example, there have been many references of women’s dependency on tobacco in the southwest, either through smoking a pipe or oozing from their mouths after they dipped snuff. Those who lived in the mountains were viewed as poor and less educated.

Works Cited

Adelman, Garry and Woodside, Mary Bays. “A House Divided: Civil War Kentucky.” American Battlefield Trust, 21 Dec. 2021, https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/house-divided-civil-war-kentucky.

“Civil War at Cumberland Gap.” National Parks Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, 14 Apr. 2015, https://www.nps.gov/cuga/civil-war-at-cumberland-gap.htm.

McKnight, Brian D. Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia. University Press of Kentucky, 2006, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1dnncdq.

McKnight, Brian D. “The Grate Strugel of War”: The Civil War in the Mountains of Eastern Kentucky and Southwestern Virginia, Mississippi State University, Ann Arbor, 2003. ProQuest, http://mutex.gmu.edu/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.mutex.gmu.edu/dissertations-theses/grate-strugel-war-civil-mountains-eastern/docview/288084662/se-2?accountid=14541.

McLean, George. "Virginia Railroads during the Civil War" Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities, (13 May. 2021). Web. 18 Mar. 2022

Noe, Kenneth W. “Red String Scare: Civil War Southwest Virginia and the Heroes of America.” The North Carolina Historical Review, vol. 69, no. 3, North Carolina Office of Archives and History, 1992, pp. 301–22, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23519173.

Southwest Virginia. (2012, November 15). The Civil War in Southwest Virginia. YouTube. Retrieved March 18, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRKX4CZOWhg  

Whisonant, Robert C. Arming the Confederacy: How Virginia’s Minerals Forged the Rebel War Machine. 1st ed., Springer International Publishing, 2015.