BRAMWELL, W.Va. — When Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Va., the state of Virginia was in ruins. The state’s cotton and tobacco agricultural-based economy fueled by slave labor was gone and after four years of fighting, most of the Commonwealth’s infrastructure had been destroyed.
Major Jedediah Hotchkiss, a Staunton, Va., based geologist who had served as General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson’s map-maker, believed that the mineral wealth of southwestern Virginia and southern Virginia could fuel the growth of an industrial economy in Virginia with a mighty port city in Norfolk, and metallurgical coal to export. Hotchkiss sent a contract surveyor from Pearisburg, Va. — Captain Isaiah A. Welch, Stonewall Jackson’s cousin — to survey the Flat Top coalfield, and recruited eastern Pennsylvania capitalists to invest in the new “Pocahontas coalfields.
Present day Bramwell Mayor Louise Stoker held an event Thursday to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War’s end, and used the side-by-side proximity of Welch’s and Hewitt’s graves in the historic Oak Hill Cemetery to serve as a conduit to tell the story. Two local historic re-enactors — Kevin Spicer and John Feuchtenberger — portrayed Welch and Hewitt respectively…