were denounced as Yankees.”  They went on to say that many Virginians wanted to confiscate the Works, and to put it into “other hands”.  Stuart and Company were denounced for making excessive profits.  In 1864 Stuart and Company contracted with the Commonwealth of Virginia for delivery of 700,000 bushels of salt, and if that delivery did not occur Virginia was to take possession of the Works. 

His major overhead was the cost of the firewood used to distill the salt, and food and clothing needed for his two thousand slaves.  Customers coming to Saltville for salt would bring in firewood with them, which was bartered to offset the cost of salt.  Presumably, he paid the local plantation owners who supplied the food and clothing with Confederate money. 

In the 1860 census he is listed as having $12,000 in real estate, and $6,000 cash.  In 1870, despite the general economic disaster visited on the Confederacy by the war, the census listed his estate as having been $325,000 in cash equivalents, and $400,000 in real estate.  This was notwithstanding the loss of the economic value of his 2,000 slaves at an average price of $300 each. 

By this process he avoided financial ruin at the end of the war, unlike most other Southerners.  Perhaps he had used his Smith relatives to make contact with all the bankrupt Confederate plantation owners of Elk Garden, and Rosedale.  In 1868 he began to pour the cash he had made during the War to buy up Elk Garden and Rosedale, paying Hendricks $60,000 for his estate of over 100,000 acres, which had grown to include the former land of the Vanhooks, and others.  He bought out the Price plantations at Rosedale, which had come to include the land on the eastern end of Webb Mountain as well as the Paint Camp land on Dry Branch, and the Shelton grant.  By the 1870 census of Russell County he was listed as having 100,000 acres in property in Russell, Washington, & Smyth Counties. 

George W. Palmer made a similar move, and bought up large tracts of top farmland near Glade Spring, which is closer to Saltville.  In 1869 Stuart and Palmer reorganized the Salt Works Corporation, which they capitalized with $1,000,000.00 cash, and soon had two hundred laborers making thousands of bushels of salt. 

Palmer specialized in breeding Short Horn cattle, and Clydesdale and Denmark horses.   

The mansion built by Thomas Hendricks at the Elk Garden Mill became known as the ‘Stuart Mansion’, because Gov. Henry Carter Stuart and State Senator Harry Stuart came to live there.  It was the Stuarts that built the circular portico onto the front of the mansion.   

Stuart’s land in Elk Garden and surrounding country became incorporated as  the ‘Stuart Land and Cattle Company’, which was for a century, the largest cattle farm in the United States east of the Mississippi River. 

   ... Continued, Page 31