John Stuart (Virginia)

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”. Owing to his Memoir of Indian Wars and Other Occurrences, written in 1799, he has been called "the most important chronicler of pioneer history in southern West Virginia".

Stuart's father, the Scotsman 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 found it necessary to immigrate to America. He settled in Augusta County, Virginia on the Shenandoah River, some distance from the town of Staunton.

At the age of twenty, John Stuart was a member of the 1769 survey by citizens of Augusta County, Virginia, which explored the wilderness of the Greenbrier Valley to the west in preparation for European settlement. The following year he built the first mill in present-day Greenbrier County, at Frankford. In 1774, he led a company of Greenbrier troops in the Battle of Point Pleasant at the confluence of the Kanawha and Ohio Rivers. On 18 November 1776, he married Agatha Lewis (1753-1836), daughter of lawyer, surveyor and Virginia pioneer Thomas Lewis (1718–1790) and granddaughter of Virginia pioneer John Lewis (1678–1762).

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