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Sent to receive medical care at Farmville, then onward to his father’s Buckingham County plantation north of that town, Robert Hubard enjoyed the rare luxury of recovering in his own house in a region of Virginia that had been spared the hard hand of war. According to Hubard’s concluding paragraph, his war memoirs were completed on 3 December 1866, a year and one-half after the conclusion of the war. It is easy to imagine that during this healing period Hubard spent hours reviewing the war letters he had sent to his family from the campaigns in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. Using a ledger as a journal, he transcribed in an easily read hand the account of his departure from the University of Virginia in 1861, the course of the war as he experienced it, and his homecoming in 1865. With the war over in Virginia and his slaves emancipated, Robert Hubard, Sr., with the help of his recovering son, struggled to keep the family plantations pro¤table. Contracts were signed with the freedmen who remained at Chellowe. Wages were paid to some, and shares of crops were paid to others. During these adjustments, Robert, Jr., became a licensed attorney and started a law practice in December 1865.1 As Virginia tobacco conditions and prices slowly declined in the postwar years, the Hubards found it more and more dif¤cult to remain solvent . Competition from NorthCarolina, South Carolina, Kentucky,Ohio, and Missouri tobacco crops cut into the Virginia market to the extent that by the time of Robert Hubard, Sr.’s, death in 1871, Robert, Jr., was the only one of the Hubard siblings who was not in debt. According to one study of the Hubard postwar fortunes, “As early as 1872, [brother] Afterword James had written to Robert, ‘We have all come to the conclusion that you are one of the “getting-along” Hubards.’ Indeed, Robert had started in the late sixties to make small but careful investments and as a lawyer in the 1870s he made sure to become directly involved in the settlement of the huge estates of Cabell and Randolph [families].”2 Robert’s fortunes in romance also blossomed in the postwar years. “It was the custom in those days for those who could afford it to spend the summer months at some of the resorts in the western portion of the State, or in Monroe and Greenbrier counties West Virginia. . . . Thither they drove in their carriages. The subject of this sketch [Hubard], young and tall and handsome, trained both in College and on the battle¤elds of the South, was at ‘The Spring’ [White Sulpher Springs] early on the morning after their arrival, and a very beautiful young lady, daughter of John R. Edmunds, educated in Baltimore, Sallie by name, came down to drink at the spring before breakfast and the young gentleman gallantly handed her a glass of water. This was the beginning of a romance that led to the union in marriage of these two.”3 Sallie and Robert were married in Halifax County, Virginia, on 27 October 1870. Eight children (Marion, Salley, John, Robert, Philip, Lyttleton, Louise, and Pocahontas) were born to the couple from 1871 to 1884. An 1887 Richmond Times-Dispatch article noted that “the Colonel and Mrs. Hubard and their daughters are keeping up the reputation for hospitality of this handsome old country place, so well known in antebellum days. . . . Cards, tennis, driving, and mountain excursion are some of the amusements of the guests. The Colonel with his courteous gallantry and Mrs. Hubard with her gracious manner and unfailing attention to her guests leave little to be desired in the role of host and hostess.”4 Having realized the futility of Chellowe’s dependence on tobacco as a cash crop, Hubard redoubled his efforts as an attorney by opening an of¤ce in Richmond to augment his Buckingham-Cumberland-Prince Edward counties practice. As his practice grew, Robert Hubard invested in several nonagricultural pursuits. A local slate quarry was purchased and then leased out as a more economical expedient. The quarry enterprise was followed by the development of a railroad spur line and the Buckingham Construction Company, both of which were to support yet another Hubard industry, the Whispering Valley Lumber Company. “In 1891 Robert and his wife transferred all the capital invested in [the] construction [company] to stock in the lumber company itself, at the time Afterword / 229 about $10,000. This lumber business would lay...

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