Appalachian Figures Series – The Story of Thomas B. Fugate of Lee, Virginia
In the late 1940s, when Thomas Bacon Fugate went to Congress, he carried more than a party label into Washington. He carried Ewing, Lee County, the Powell Valley, and a life built around farming, banking, livestock, local trade, and courthouse politics.
Fugate was usually listed in public records as Thomas B. Fugate. To the United States House of Representatives, he was a Democrat from Virginia’s Ninth District. To Lee County, he was one of its own public men, a farmer and banker whose career moved from the local store and bank counter to Richmond, a state constitutional convention, and finally the halls of Congress.
His time in Washington lasted only two terms, from 1949 to 1953, but it came during a turning point in Southwest Virginia politics. He followed John W. Flannagan Jr., the long serving Democratic congressman from Bristol, and was followed by William C. Wampler, the Republican from Pennington Gap who would become one of the Ninth District’s best known modern political figures. Between those two longer congressional careers stood Fugate, a quieter figure whose life shows how deeply local leadership in Appalachia could reach into state and national politics.
From Claiborne County to Lee County
Thomas Bacon Fugate was born April 10, 1899, near Tazewell in Claiborne County, Tennessee. A later family-connected sketch placed his birth more specifically on a farm east of Tazewell along Powell River. That detail matters because Fugate’s life never strayed far from the borderland world of the upper Powell Valley, where Tennessee and Virginia families, markets, churches, and farms often crossed the state line more easily than maps suggest.
He attended public schools in Tennessee, then studied at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in 1917 and Lincoln Memorial University at Harrogate in 1918. Lincoln Memorial stood close to the mountain counties that shaped him, and the school’s regional mission fit a young man whose later public life would remain tied to the Appalachian border counties of Tennessee and Virginia.
By 1921 Fugate had moved to Rose Hill, Virginia, in Lee County. There he entered the mercantile business, part of the practical economy that held small mountain communities together. Country stores were not just places to buy flour, nails, cloth, feed, and tools. They were places where farmers talked politics, credit was extended by reputation, and a man’s standing in the community was measured by steadiness as much as ambition.
Fugate later moved deeper into Ewing’s business life. From 1936 to 1940 he operated in the hardware business there, while also farming. The official congressional biography describes him as engaged in agricultural pursuits, and Virginia House records later called him a farm owner and operator. That combination of business and land gave him the kind of local base that often carried Appalachian public men into office.
Banking, Livestock, and Public Service
Fugate’s name became connected to several institutions that tell us much about his place in Lee County. He became president of the Peoples Bank of Ewing in 1935, director of Virginia-Tennessee Farm Bureau, Inc., in 1936, and president of Ewing Live Stock Co., Inc., in 1938.
Those titles may look ordinary on a government biography, but they describe the working center of his world. In an agricultural county, a bank mattered because farmers, merchants, and families depended on credit. A livestock company mattered because cattle and farm trade helped connect mountain farms to wider markets. A farm bureau mattered because agricultural organization gave rural people a political and economic voice.
Fugate was not a politician who happened to live in Lee County. His public career grew out of the county’s institutions. The bank, the farm, the livestock company, the chamber of commerce, the church, and Democratic politics all overlapped in the same small world. In that setting, a person’s business reputation could become a political credential.
Virginia House of Delegates records also identify him as Presbyterian and connected to the chamber of commerce and governor’s commissions. These affiliations place him in the kind of civic network that shaped much of twentieth century Appalachian public life, especially in county seats and small towns where the same people often served in business, church, agricultural, and political roles.
A Delegate from Lee County
Fugate’s first major elected office came in Richmond. The U.S. House biography summarizes his Virginia House of Delegates service as 1928 to 1930. The Virginia House of Delegates DOME database lists him in the 1928 session as a Democrat representing Lee County.
His committee assignments in that session were Counties, Cities and Towns, House Expenses, Public Property, and Retrenchment and Economy. The names are plain, but they fit a local public servant from a rural county. Counties, towns, public property, and economy in government were the everyday concerns of state politics. For a mountain delegate, those issues were not abstract. They touched roads, courthouses, schools, public buildings, and the relationship between Richmond and the far southwestern counties.
Fugate’s state legislative service was brief, but it marked him as a Democratic figure in Lee County and Southwest Virginia. By the 1930s and 1940s, he was part of the region’s political machinery, not only as an officeholder but as an organizer and campaign figure.
Contemporary newspapers show him active in Ninth District Democratic politics before he entered Congress himself. In 1940, the Dickenson Forum identified him as a former Virginia House delegate when he placed John W. Flannagan in nomination. Other campaign references from the early 1940s connect Tom B. Fugate of Lee County with Flannagan’s congressional campaigns. By the time Flannagan retired, Fugate was not a stranger to the district organization. He had been helping turn its gears for years.
Welfare, Convention, and Wartime Politics
Fugate’s public career did not stop with the House of Delegates. He served on the Virginia Board of Public Welfare from 1937 to 1947. Those were years of Depression recovery, New Deal programs, wartime strain, and postwar adjustment. In mountain counties like Lee, public welfare was not a distant bureaucratic subject. It touched families facing poverty, disability, widowhood, old age, and the uneven economy of coal, farming, and small trade.
In 1944 Fugate was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. The next year he served as a member of the Constitutional Convention of Virginia in 1945. That convention did not make him a household name across the state, but it placed him among the Virginians chosen to take part in one of the formal constitutional moments of the Commonwealth.
For Lee County, it meant that one of its farmers and bankers had become part of the state’s official political structure. Fugate was no longer simply a local Democrat or a former delegate. He was a man whose name appeared in state records, party records, and public service records during a period when Virginia and the nation were moving from the New Deal era into the postwar world.
The 1948 Race for Congress
The opening for Fugate came in 1948. John W. Flannagan Jr., who had represented Virginia’s Ninth District since 1931, did not run again. The Ninth District covered a rugged and politically distinct part of Virginia. Southwest Virginia had never fit neatly into the old image of the Solid South. Republicans had deep roots in the mountain counties, and congressional races could be competitive.
Newspaper reports from the spring of 1948 show Democrats rallying around Fugate. The Smyth County News reported “Democrats Nominate Fugate” on April 1, 1948. The Lebanon News reported the following day that Thomas Bacon Fugate of Lee County had received the Democratic nomination after Flannagan stepped aside. These contemporary reports described him in the terms that followed him through public life, as a Lee County farmer and banker.
In the general election, Fugate faced Republican T. Eugene Worrell. The official Virginia historical election returns list Fugate with 33,550 votes and Worrell with 30,466 in the Ninth District. It was a clear win, but not an overwhelming one. The margin reflected the character of the district, where party loyalty, local reputation, county machines, and personal networks all mattered.
When Fugate took office on January 3, 1949, he entered the Eighty-first Congress as the representative from Virginia’s Ninth District. He was a Democrat, but he came from a region where Democratic success had to be organized and defended county by county.
Two Terms in the U.S. House
Official congressional records describe Fugate as a Democrat of Ewing, Virginia, a farmer and banker, and a representative in the Eighty-first and Eighty-second Congresses. His service ran from January 3, 1949, to January 3, 1953.
His Washington career was short, but it reached into several important areas. Committee records place him in the orbit of the House Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries, a committee whose jurisdiction included transportation by water, the Coast Guard, lighthouses, the Coast and Geodetic Survey, the Panama Canal, and fisheries. A later family-connected biography also remembered his work on matters involving the Panama Canal and described service on the Banking and Currency Committee during the last two years of his congressional career.
That combination may seem surprising for a congressman from a landlocked mountain district. Yet it shows how Congress worked. Representatives from Appalachia did not deal only with mountain roads, farms, coal, or local relief. They were assigned to national questions, and their votes and committee work became part of larger debates over commerce, finance, federal lending, transportation, and American responsibilities overseas.
Fugate’s background as a banker likely made financial questions familiar to him. His farm and livestock experience also connected him to the concerns of rural credit, agricultural markets, and small-town economic survival. Whether in Richmond or Washington, he remained identified by the same practical words, farmer and banker.
In 1950 Fugate ran again. Newspaper notices that spring reported him unopposed for renomination. In November he defeated Republican George C. Sutherland. The official state results list Fugate with 26,802 votes and Sutherland with 19,118. His second victory was stronger than the first, but it did not lead to a long congressional career.
Fugate was not a candidate for renomination in 1952. That year William C. Wampler, a Republican from Lee County, won the Ninth District seat. The change marked a new chapter in Southwest Virginia politics. Fugate returned to Ewing as a banker and farmer, while Wampler began a career that would stretch across two separate periods in Congress.
Back to Ewing
After leaving Congress, Fugate did not become a national political celebrity. That was not the shape of his life. He returned to the Lee County world that had produced him.
The official House biography describes him after Congress simply as a banker and farmer, resident of Ewing. Those words may seem plain, but they are fitting. Fugate’s public life had never been separated from his local identity. The same place that gave him his business base and political start remained his home after Washington.
Thomas Bacon Fugate died in Ewing on September 22, 1980. He was buried in Richmond Cemetery in Ewing. His grave placed him back in the community that had defined his adult life.
Why Thomas B. Fugate Matters
Thomas B. Fugate’s story matters because it shows the path of an Appalachian public man whose influence grew from local trust. He was not a fiery national figure or a long-serving congressional institution. He was something more common in the history of mountain politics and just as revealing, a county businessman whose farm, bank, store, church, party work, and public service formed one continuous life.
Through Fugate, Lee County touched Richmond and Washington. A man born near Tazewell, Tennessee, and rooted in Ewing, Virginia, became a state delegate, a public welfare board member, a constitutional convention delegate, a Democratic National Convention delegate, and a two-term member of Congress.
His career also helps explain the political bridge between John W. Flannagan and William C. Wampler. Fugate stood between two better remembered Ninth District figures, but his own life captured a transition. He belonged to the older world of courthouse Democrats, agricultural leadership, community banking, and local political organization. Yet he served in Congress during the early Cold War, the Korean War period, and the expanding federal government of the postwar years.
For Lee County, Thomas B. Fugate was more than a name in a congressional directory. He was a reminder that small Appalachian communities have often sent their own people into larger rooms of power. Some stayed for decades. Some served only briefly. Fugate served briefly, but his path from Ewing to Washington belongs in the record of Southwest Virginia.
Sources & Further Reading
U.S. House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives. “FUGATE, Thomas Bacon.” Accessed June 12, 2026. https://history.house.gov/People/Listing/F/FUGATE%2C-Thomas-Bacon-%28F000399%29/
Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. “FUGATE, Thomas Bacon.” Accessed June 12, 2026. https://bioguide.congress.gov/search/bio/F000399
Virginia House of Delegates History. “Thomas Bacon Fugate.” DOME: Database of House Members. Accessed June 12, 2026. https://history.house.virginia.gov/members/9708
Commonwealth of Virginia. “Thomas B. Fugate.” Historical Elections Database. Accessed June 12, 2026. https://historical.elections.virginia.gov/candidate/54466
Commonwealth of Virginia. “T. Eugene Worrell.” Historical Elections Database. Accessed June 12, 2026. https://historical.elections.virginia.gov/candidate/54467
Commonwealth of Virginia. “George C. Sutherland.” Historical Elections Database. Accessed June 12, 2026. https://historical.elections.virginia.gov/candidate/54478
United States Congress. Official Congressional Directory for the Use of the United States Congress. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1949. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CDIR-1949-02-15/text/CDIR-1949-02-15.txt
United States Congress. Official Congressional Directory for the Use of the United States Congress. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1951. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CDIR-1951-03-01/text/CDIR-1951-03-01.txt
United States Congress. Official Congressional Directory for the Use of the United States Congress. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1952. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CDIR-1952-01-08/text/CDIR-1952-01-08.txt
United States Congress. Congressional Record. 1951. “Old Dominion Electric Cooperative” entry mentioning Watkins M. Abbitt and Thomas B. Fugate. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1951-pt4/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1951-pt4-4-2.pdf
United States House of Representatives. Members of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. Committee Print, 115th Congress. Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, 2018. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CPRT-115HPRT33394/pdf/CPRT-115HPRT33394.pdf
“Smyth County News, Volume 65, Number 11, April 1, 1948.” Virginia Chronicle. Library of Virginia. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=SCN19480401.1.1
“Lebanon News, Volume 70, March 31, 1950.” Virginia Chronicle. Library of Virginia. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=LN19500331.1.1
“Virginia Mountaineer, Volume 28, March 23, 1950.” Virginia Chronicle. Library of Virginia. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=VM19500323.1.1
“Bland Messenger, October 24, 1940.” Virginia Chronicle. Library of Virginia. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=BLM19401024.1.1
“Dickenson County Herald, April 6, 1944.” Virginia Chronicle. Library of Virginia. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=DCH19440406.1.1
“Dickenson Forum, April 11, 1940.” Virginia Chronicle. Library of Virginia. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=DFO19400411.1.1
Fugate, Mrs. Thomas. “Thomas B. Fugate, Ex-Congressman.” Historical Sketches of Southwest Virginia. Historical Society of Southwest Virginia. https://sites.rootsweb.com/~vahsswv/historicalsketches/fugate%20thomasb.html
Encyclopedia Virginia. “Members of the United States House of Representatives from Virginia.” Accessed June 12, 2026. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/members-of-the-united-states-house-of-representatives-from-virginia/
VirginiaPlaces.org. “Congressional Representatives from the Fighting Ninth.” Accessed June 12, 2026. https://www.virginiaplaces.org/government/fightingninth.html
The Political Graveyard. “Index to Politicians: Fryar to Fullenwider.” Accessed June 12, 2026. https://politicalgraveyard.com/bio/fryall-fullam.html
FamilySearch. “Thomas Bacon Fugate, 1899–1980.” Accessed June 12, 2026. https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/KNWR-6VT/thomas-bacon-fugate-1899-1980
Find a Grave. “Thomas Bacon Fugate.” Memorial no. 7932145. Accessed June 12, 2026. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/7932145/thomas_bacon-fugate
Author Note: Thomas B. Fugate’s life is a reminder that Appalachian political history often began in banks, farms, stores, churches, and county party meetings. Readers with family papers, campaign materials, photographs, or Lee County memories connected to Fugate are encouraged to help preserve more of the record.