Joshua Fry Bullitt, Jr.

Joshua Fry Bullitt, Jr. (July 24, 1856 – 1933) was a Virginia lawyer who practiced in Big Stone Gap, Virginia. He was one of the leading citizens of Southwest Virginia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, both as a practicing lawyer and as a political figure. His prominence corresponded with the rise of the coal business in central Appalachia. His legacy includes both the continuation of the energy companies that he helped to create, and the outstanding careers of the legal figures who worked with and learned from him, just as he was the heir to a series of accomplished legal figures. As the leader of a citizen police force, he was the model for a character in one of the best-selling novels in the United States in the first half of the 20th century.

Born in Jefferson County, Kentucky, Bullitt was the son of Joshua Fry Bullitt, a former Chief Justice of the Kentucky Court of Appeals. His ancestors included Colonel John Henry, father of Patrick Henry, Joshua Fry of the College of William & Mary, the Southwest Virginia explorer Thomas Walker, and his great-grandfather, Alexander Scott Bullitt, for whom Bullitt County, Kentucky was named. His first cousins included William Marshall Bullitt, who served as United States Solicitor General during the Taft administration, and who refurbished the family's ancestral home, Oxmoor Farm. Joshua Bullitt, Jr., won a scholarship to attend Washington & Lee University, graduating in 1876. He learned the law from his father, and from former U.S. Attorney General James Speed, and by attending the summer lectures of Professor John B. Minor of the University of Virginia Law School, before starting out as a lawyer in 1880. Bullitt served in the Kentucky legislature in 1884 and 1885, and ran for Congress in Virginia in 1896, when the incumbent was James A. Walker.

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