Scott (Davis?) County, Virginia

hoosier

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Feb 20, 2005
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Carlisle, PA
I volunteer at the National Civil War Museum in Harrisburg a couple afternoons a week. The museum has a voluminous collection of letters, and my assignment is to transcribe those letters into electronic files, so that the contents of the letters will still be able to be read after the original paper has deteriorated.

Currently I'm working on a set of letters from the Wood family, which was based in Scott County, Virginia. The county is in the far southwestern part of Virginia, along the Tennessee state line.

The Wood family letters collection is extensive, dating back to the 1820's. The family was prominent in the county, as one of the forebears held the position of high sheriff of the county. For years and years, those who wrote the family's letters spoke with great pride of Scott County.

By the time of the Civil War, the family consisted of the father, the mother, five sons, and three daughters. In many cases, collections of Civil War letters consist only of letters which a soldier sent home to his wife, who saved them, while letters from home to the soldier were lost during the soldier's movements and have not survived to the present time. But the Wood family collection contains many letters written from home to the sons who were serving in the Confederate military.

I'm currently working on letters written in 1861, and I noticed something interesting. The father, James O. Wood, datelines his letters as coming from Pleasant Hill (evidently the name of the family farm), Scott County, Virginia. The eldest daughter, Juliett Wood, datelines her letters as coming from Pleasant Hill, Davis County, Virginia.

I wondered - how could the same farmhouse be located in two different counties?

Well, it wasn't. It was located in Scott County.

The thing is, Scott County was founded in 1814. When the good citizens of the new county were trying to figure out what to call themselves, they decided to name the county for a general who had come from Virginia and who had performed admirably during the War of 1812, even though he wasn't dead and was, in fact, still a relatively young man.

He was Winfield Scott. Of course, by the time of the Civil War, many Virginians regarded him as a turncoat who had forsaken his native state and gone over to the detested Yankees.

I can find no record that Scott County ever officially changed its name, and I can find no record of a Davis County ever existing in Virginia.

My guess is that, although James O. Wood was willing to continue to use the traditional name for the county, Juliett was looking for something - anything - else that she could call it.

There's nothing specifically stated in Juliett's letters as to why she chose to call her county Davis County, but I have found that the first company of militia raised in Scott County named themselves the Estillville Davis Guards. Unless someone can tell me differently, my speculation is that the militia company couldn't abide the idea of calling themselves the Scott Guards and named themselves after Jefferson Davis instead, and then Juliett decided to refer to the county by the name of the militia company.
 
Yes, Harvey was indeed one of the members of the family that wrote the letters, as was his brother H. Clinton Wood, who served in the same unit.

Harvey lived until 1917 and was the author of a book titled "The War: 'Stonewall' Jackson, His Campaigns, and Battles, the Regiment as I Saw Them." The book was apparently considered sufficiently significant to merit a review by James Robertson. Robertson thought it was a good book, though he noted some factual errors. He said those were excusable, considering that Wood wrote the book on the basis of his own personal recollections forty years after the war.
 
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