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Smyth County News
May 08, 2009
By DAN KEGLEY/Staff
“The Aspenvale cemetery at Seven Mile Ford in Smyth County
is one of Virginia’s most noteworthy
historical sites west of the Blue Ridge.
Aspenvale was a pioneer settlement, a gathering place for part of the
overmountain army (which defeated the Royalist forces led by Patrick Ferguson
at the Battle of King’s Mountain in October 1781), a stop for westward pioneers
on their way to Daniel Boone’s Wilderness Road;
it is also the burial place of several notable Virginians. Today, the Aspenvale
cemetery is designated as a Registered National Historic Site, a Virginia
Historic Landmark, and a stop on the Overmountain Victory National Historic
Trail.“
“However, despite its historic significance, Aspenvale cemetery has never been
the subject of a scholarly article. That neglect is here redressed.“
Thus begins Jim Glanville and John M. Preston’s paper on the
cemetery in Volume XIII of the Smithfield Review, published this spring.
Three years in the writing, the paper situates the cemetery within the larger
historical picture of the region in the 1700s, discusses the cemetery’s chain
of ownership, and lists the burials there.
Principal author Glanville said the project “was prompted by seeing John
Preston’s rather crude map of the grave sites.”
Neighbors of the cemetery helped Glanville find Preston in Knoxville. Glanville “suggested we work
together on making a better map. The writing project grew from there. The
writing and revising was spread out over the three years.”
For the uninitiated, Aspenvale cemetery sits on a shoulder of a slope rising
from Seven Mile Ford Road
to the north, and is reached via a driveway that also serves a private home and
leaves Seven Mile Ford Road’s
intersection with Spring Branch Road. Years ago, a small livestock market
operated at the entrance of the cemetery driveway in a building now
metal-sided.
The interred at Aspenvale include “Hero of King’s Mountain” Gen. William
Campbell, his wife and revolutionary orator Patrick Henry’s sister Elizabeth
Henry Campbell Russell, as well as other notable figures from the colonial and
later periods.
The presence of Campbell’s
grave figures prominently in the cemetery’s successful nomination for the
National Register of Historic Places in 1980. The nomination form completed by
the Virginia Historic Landmarks Commission Staff said, “Born in Augusta County,
Virginia, in 1745, William Campbell pioneered
in the settlement of the Holston
River Valley.
As captain of militia of Fincastle County, Campbell
first distinguished himself in frontier skirmishes with the Cherokees and later
took an active part in Governor Lord Dunmore’s war against the Indians in 1774.
Marriage to Elizabeth Henry, the sister of Patrick Henry, made him an early
ally of Virginia’s
staunchest opponent of British policy.”
It takes 11 pages of endnotes to list the 144 sources referenced in the 40-page
paper. That degree of research characterizes Glanville’s work as a historian, a
career that blossomed over the six years since he retired.
Glanville, born in London
in 1941, is steeped in scholarship and science. He graduated from Alleyn’s
School, London,
worked for British Oxygen Company there, attended the Royal College of Science,
graduating in 1962 with a B.Sc. degree in chemistry with a geology minor.
In 1962 he emigrated to the United States
and graduated with a Ph.D. degree from the University of Maryland
in 1967.
Following brief employment as a research chemist with FMC Corporation in Princeton, N.J., he moved
to Roanoke in 1969 where he was first professor
of chemistry at Virginia
Western Community
College and later vice-president of research and
development at Wen-Don Chemical Corporation. He became director of general
chemistry at Virginia Tech in 1986 and moved to Blacksburg. He retired from Virginia Tech in
February 2004, and is now emeritus professor of chemistry. He became an
American citizen on July 4, 1972 in Roanoke.
Smyth County
has been a focal point of Glanville’s research in Southwest
Virginia’s history. “My feelings are very strong about the
under-appreciated nature of our region’s history,” he said.
Within Smyth County, Saltville has been of particular
interest. With the Saltville
Valley’s salt and gypsum
resources, it’s not surprising the area would capture a chemist/geologist’s
attention. But it is the human story of Saltville and Smyth County,
particularly the unrecorded chapters that by definition constitute prehistory,
that particularly engage Glanville.
As his retirement date drew near, Glanville contacted Smithfield Review editor
Hugh Campbell in October 2003 “and proposed writing a Smithfield Review article
about closing of the Olin chemical plant,” Glanville said.
“Hugh politely and respectfully declined my proposal on the grounds that 1970
was not sufficiently historical for the Review. ‘Do you not have something more
ancient,’ or words to that effect, he asked. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I have found this
amazing article on the Web that tells that the Spanish attacked Saltville in
1567.’”
Glanville said Campbell
was “immediately very enthusiastic about the conquistadors and brushed aside my
demurral that I really knew nothing about the subject. ‘I’ll extend the
deadline until the end of January,’ he said. Consequently, implausible as it
seems,
over the ensuing eight to 10 weeks I did all the needed research, found almost
all the sources, and wrote an article that has not ever been seriously
challenged. In retrospect I remain disbelieving that I actually pulled it off.
But there it is.”
Glanville, who considers himself an “armchair archaeologist,” has devoted much
time and energy in distilling what knowledge about the past can be gained from
artifact collections. For professional archaeologists, an artifact’s location
in the ground – its depth and position relative to other artifacts – holds much
more information than the artifact itself. But Glanville believes much can be
learned as patterns emerge in artifacts in collectors’ possession when they can
be traced back to particular locations.
Glanville said that while the idea of Spanish conquistadors attacking native
Americans at what would become Saltville piqued his interest in prehistory, he
remained focused on the Olin plant.
“During the Spring of 2004, he said, “I made repeated trips to Saltville
seeking to interview people who had worked at the Olin plant and were familiar
with its story, and especially with its closing days. Often, after
interviewing people about the chemical
plant they would say to me, “Do you want to see my Indian relics.“ I did, and
was amazed. I was more amazed when I studied the archeological literature and
concluded that there had been a well-developed Indian culture in Saltville that
had never been professionally documented. That was the beginning of my study of
improper archeology. But the point was never the improper archeological stuff.
Rather, it and is the
people who made and used the stuff.”
A key interest of Glanville’s is inscribed shell gorgets, decorative and
probable status symbols worn on a thong around the neck. He describes
Saltville-style gorgets and has identified in other states specimens he
believes originated in Saltville and that apparently contradict longstanding
claims that no important prehistoric culture existed in this region.
Glanville coined the term Holstonia a few years ago to describe the region
including and surrounding Smyth County that is drained by the three forks of
the Holston River, along which in late prehistory native Americans lived
settled lives that promote the development of shared culture. He has a book in
the works on that subject.
Glanville’s Web site, http://www.holstonia.net,
contains a Holstonia bibliography of Southwest Virginia
history, listing resources covering a span of time from the Ice Age to about
1785.
“That bibliography is organized into 12 chapters,” Glanville said. “A crisp,
12-chapter book without a lot of academic paraphernalia is perhaps a good way
of informing the intelligent and thoughtful reader about the story of
Holstonia. It seemed to me to be
logical to write the bibliography before writing the book.”
While Aspenvale is solidly a fixture of European history, the lack of a
published history of the site was a void Glanville sought to fill. He found
most interesting along the way “the story of the early opening of Southwest Virginia. More specifically the events at
Stalnaker’s cabin near the Middle Fork of the Holston
below Chilhowie and the story of the army that came down the valley as one of
the two pincers of the Cherokee war of 1760-61. The stories of William Byrd III
and Adam Stephen, who took over as commander from Byrd, are very interesting.
Studying them led to my studying Fort Robinson in present-day Kingsport and that study will be the subject
of a future paper.”
Glanville’s second career as an armchair archaeologist and a historian has only
just begun but the fruits of his labors are already ripening. “I have
written formal articles and presented at conferences over the past three to
four years to establish a reputation as a deadly serious amateur historian,” he
said.
What the crop looks will look like fully emerged can only be imagined.
The Smithfield Review, annually published by the Montgomery Branch of the
Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities in Blacksburg,
“was founded with the purpose of helping to preserve the often neglected
history of the region west of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia and adjacent states,” the journal
said.
Copies are available at the Museum of the Middle Appalachians in Saltville.
http://www.swvatoday.com/comments/research_focuses_on_smyth_cemetery/news/5189/
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