Mistress of the Mansion, Ellen Tompkins of West Virginia’s Gauley Bridge: Caught Between Two Opposing Armies

16thVA

First Sergeant
Joined
Dec 8, 2008
Location
Philadelphia
This is a very long article.


The Union army’s local commander, Brigadier General Jacob D. Cox, described the military situation of the upper Kanawha Valley that had only recently fallen under the control of newly mobilized soldiers from Ohio and Kentucky. Key to controlling access to the valley and blocking a Confederate counterattack involved the fortifying of a large farm that was adjacent to the major east-west transportation route through the region, the James River and Kanawha Turnpike. The farm was the property of Colonel Christopher Q. Tompkins, a West Point graduate and current commander of the First Kanawha Regiment that was opposing the forces under Cox’s command as the gradually fortified Tompkins’s farm became the key to the Union’s army’s control of the area. Living on the farm was Colonel Tompkins’ wife and their children.

Ellen Tompkins’ letters written from their farm provides a very interesting insight into the lives of Virginians as the early Civil War was being fought around them.

Jacob Cox described both the location and situation:

“Nothing could be more romantically beautiful than the situation of the post at Gauley Bridge. The hamlet had, before our arrival there, consisted of a cluster of two or three dwellings, a country store, a little tavern, and a church, irregularly scattered along the base of the mountain and facing the road which turns from the Gauley valley into that of the Kanawha. The lower slope of the hillside behind the houses was cultivated, and a hedgerow separated the lower fields from the upper pasturage. Above this gentler slope the wooded steeps rose more precipitately, the sandstone rock jutting out into crags and walls, the sharp ridge above having scarcely soil enough to nourish the chestnut-trees, here, like Mrs. Browning’s woods of Vallombrosa, literally “clinging by their spurs to the precipices.” In the angle between the Gauley and New rivers rose Gauley Mount, the base a perpendicular wall of rocks of varying height, with high wooded slopes above. There was barely room for the road between the wall of rocks and the water on the New River side, but after going some distance up the valley, the highway gradually ascended the hillside, reaching some rolling uplands at a distance of a couple of miles. Here was Gauley Mount, the country-house of Colonel C. Q. Tompkins, formerly of the Army of the United States, but now the commandant of a Confederate regiment raised in the Kanawha valley.

“Across New River the heavy masses of Cotton Mountain rose rough and almost inaccessible from the very water’s edge. The western side of Cotton Mountain was less steep, and buttresses formed a bench about its base, so that in looking across the Kanawha a mile below the junction of the rivers, one saw some rounded foothills which had been cleared on the top and tilled, and a gap in the mountainous wall made room on that side for a small creek which descended to the Kanawha, and whose bed served for a rude country road leading to Fayette C. H. At the base of Cotton Mountain the Kanawha equals the united width of the two tributaries, and flows foaming over broken rocks with treacherous channels between, till it dashes over the horseshoe ledge below, known far and wide as the Kanawha Falls. On either bank near the falls a small mill had been built, that on the right bank a saw-mill and the one on the left for grinding grain.”

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Mistress of the Mansion, Ellen Tompkins of West Virginia’s Gauley Bridge: Caught Between Two Opposing Armies






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