Colonel John Stuart (17 March 1749 in Augusta County, Virginia – 18 August 1823 in Greenbrier County, Virginia [now West Virginia]) was a Revolutionary War commander and pioneering western Virginia settler. A veteran of the Battle of Point Pleasant (1774), he surveyed and settled the Greenbrier Valley and is known locally as the “Father of Greenbrier County”.
Stuart's father, David Stuart, was among the supporters of Charles Edward Stuart ("Bonnie Prince Charlie") as king of Great Britain. They were distant relatives.} Soon after the failure of the Prince's cause at Culloden (1746) David Stuart immigrated from Scotland to America.[1] He settled in Augusta County, Virginia on the Shenandoah River, some distance from the town of Staunton.
At age twenty, John Stuart became a member of the 1769 survey by Augusta County citizens of the Greenbrier Valley to the west in preparation. The following year, he built the first mill in present day Greenbrier County, at Frankford. He led a company of Greenbrier militiamen in the 1774 Battle of Point Pleasant; four years later he was a militia officer when the last Indian raid was made on Fort Donnally, near Lewis Spring (Lewisburg).
In October 1774, Stuart witnessed the slaughter of four Indians including the Shawnee Chief Cornstalk, who had come to Fort Randolph to explain the Shawnee poisition. Cornstalk explained that he desired peace, but the young Shawnee wanted war. Conrstalk's brutal murder by a mob was denounced by Patrick Henry and the Virginia House of Burgesses.
Stuart was one of Lewisburg’s first trustees, and in 1780 he became the county’s first clerk. (His office in Lewisburg still exists.) He attended the 1788 Virginia Ratifying Convention and advocated ratification of the U.S. Constitution. In 1789 he built a large stone house known as “Stuart Manor” at Fort Spring, near Lewisburg. He donated the land the first county courthouse and the Old Stone Church in Lewisburg stand on.
Stuart corresponded Thomas Jefferson, and in 1796 he sent Jefferson fossil bones he had obtained from a salt petre cave near his home. These specimens were eventually determined to be prehistoric and to were named Megalonyx jeffersonii, meaning Jefferson's Ground Sloth.
John Stuart died in 1823 and wa buried in the family cemetery at “Stuart Manor",as was his wife Agatha Lewis Stuart, daughter Thomas Lewis, a brother of General Andrew Lewis. [2]