WELCOME TO LAUREL HILL

THE BIRTHPLACE AND BOYHOOD HOME OF MAJOR GENERAL J.E.B. STUART C.S.A.

1st Annual Highland Games click for photos

Confederate Major General James Ewell Brown Stuart told his brother William Alexander Stuart in 1863 "I would give anything to make a pilgrimage to the old place, and when the war is over quietly spend the rest of my days there." J.E.B Stuart never returned to his birthplace and boyhood home, but thanks to a group of local citizens you today can visit the site where one of the greatest soldiers to sit upon a horse learned to ride.

Laurel Hill is located in the southwestern part of Patrick County on the dividing line between the piedmont and the mountains and within sight of the boundary line of North Carolina and Virginia. The seventy-five acre site, owned by the J.E.B. Stuart Birthplace Preservation Trust, is open to the public dawn to dusk for self-guided walking tours and a Civil War encampment in the fall.

Archibald and Elizabeth Stuart and their brood of eleven children lived at Laurel Hill from the mid 1820s until 1859 when the latter sold the property to men from nearby Mount Airy, North Carolina. The site passed through several local families until the non-profit Stuart Trust purchased it in 1991. Archibald Stuart was a prominent politician and attorney of his time attending two constitutional conventions in Virginia along with representing Patrick County in both houses of the Virginia Legislature and one term in the United States House of Representatives. Elizabeth Stuart was known as a strict religious woman with a great love of nature. Both traits can be seen in the personality of their most famous offspring.

Ironically, like "Jeb" Stuart, his great-grandfather, William Letcher, lost his life fighting for his country's independence while still in his early thirties. In the summer of 1780, the British were beginning their move through the Carolinas for a rendezvous with Washington and Rochambeau at Yorktown, William Letcher, a local patriot leader, his wife and new baby were living along the banks of the Ararat River when the pro-British or Tories as they were known picked Letcher out as a target and killed him. He is buried there on Laurel Hill property in the oldest marked grave in Patrick County.

In 1998, Laurel Hill was placed on the Virginia Landmark Register, followed later that year by inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places.