Stuart Knob Mine, Patrick County, Virginia, USAi

Regional Level Types
Stuart Knob Mine	Mine
Patrick County	County
Virginia	State
USA	Country

In 1827, George Hairston Senior died . His 20,000 acre tract in Patrick and Henry Counties, known as "The Iron Works", passed to his eldest son John (Henry County Will Book #3, page 159) who resided on the property and operated his father's various business interests in the area . This very large estate extended east along the Goblintown Creek watershed from about current State Route 704 in Patrick County to the Smith River, and south to Blackberry Creek. It included much of the northeastern corner of Patrick County and the northwestern corner of Henry County, as well as most of what is now the furniture town of Bassett. After their father’s death, John and his brother George II united in partnership with Peter Hairston, their first cousin and husband of their sister Ruth, to continue and expand the small scale iron industry begun by their father from a rich vein of magnetite in and about Stuart’s Knob, a craggy hill rising five hundred feet over Goblintown Creek on John's property. On 10 November 1836, the partnership was formally recorded under the name "Union Iron Works Company" (Henry County Deed Book #9, page 395).

In 1905, the Virginia Ore and Lumber Company was incorporated in the Commonwealth of Virginia with principals Frank A. Hill, Herbert D. Lafferty, Junius B. Fishburn, Edward I. Stone, and Thomas W.Goodwin. On 25 August of that year, the Hills and Laffertys sold their 4,840 acres, then called "Union Furnace Iron Works", to the Virginia Ore and Lumber Company in exchange for payoff, with interest, of the final $8,888.89 installment on the note held by the Barksdale heirs of the Hills and Laffertys (Patrick County Deed Book #34, page 193). Mr. Hill also transferred his other interests in the area, including the 7,500 acre leasehold, to the VO&L. The area was given a new name, "Fayerdale", concocted by Alice Hill from her husband’s first initial, his middle name, and Herbert Laffertys middle name.

Beginning soon after the Hill and Lafferty purchase, Fayerdale blossomed into a booming mining and logging town. The mining operations in Stuart's Knob were mechanized with pneumatic drills, electric lighting, iron cart railways, and a tramway, all powered by steam driven generators and winches in a new power house.

Engineering drawings of the mine complex could not be found, but surmising from published recollections and pieces of surviving hardware, a single large boiler in the power house provided steam to power an air compressor, electric generator, and double drum winch. Compressed air was piped to a riveted iron tank near the main mine adit to drive drills for boring dynamite blasting holes to break out iron ore. Generator output provided electric lighting in the mine tunnels and office building, power for a magnetic separator belt in the ore tipple, and charging of batteries for the telephone system which connected the office, freight station, and train depots in Fayerdale and Philpott. Cables from the winch ran an aerial tramway which delivered buckets of raw ore to the tipple and its separator machine at the foot of the knob. Clean ore from the tipple chutes filled gondolas which carried the ore via VO&L and N&W railroads to smelting furnaces around Pulaski, Virginia.

In the early 1920’s, the mining and logging operations began to decline. According to historical accounts, it was around this time that many families began to move away, seeking employment elsewhere. Others turned to illegal liquor production as a means of putting food on the table, and the area became known for its moonshining activity. Area residents still talk about “the Fayerdale tragedy,” a dispute in which some of the moonshiners turned on each other, resulting in more than one death.

In 1933, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was formed. The CCC went to work building Virginia’s original six state parks, among many other public works projects. Roanoke newspaper publisher Junius B. Fishburn donated the 4,639-acre site for Fairy Stone State Park, making it the largest of the six original parks and one of the largest to this day. The former town of Fayerdale was flooded to make way for the parks 168-acre lake.

Ore from the Bedrock:
In 1906, the Virginia Ore and Lumber Company modernized the mining operations on Staurt's Knob. Instead of digging the ore with picks and shovels, the miners chiseled the ore from the mountain with jackhammers powered by compressed air. Cable cars on a tramway, similar to a train track, hauled the ore from the mines to the processing plant, or tipple, at the base of Stuart's Knob. Once at the tipple, the cars emptied the ore on a magnetic picking belt. The metallic ore stuck to the belt and the non-metallic rock rolled off.