Appalachian Figures Series – The Story of Rufus A. Ayers of Scott, Virginia
Rufus A. Ayers is one of those Appalachian figures whose life cannot be kept inside one county line. He was born in Bedford County, raised partly around Bristol, made his name as a lawyer and public man in Scott County, served as attorney general of Virginia, and later became one of the major promoters of Big Stone Gap and the coalfield boom in Wise County.
Yet the Scott County part of his story matters deeply. Before the stone mansion in Big Stone Gap, before the Supreme Court case, before the banks, railroads, coal companies, and political campaigns, Ayers was a young man building a career in Estillville, the courthouse town that would become Gate City. It was there that he studied law, entered public office, edited a local newspaper, and began looking westward through the mountains toward the industrial future of Southwest Virginia.
His life shows how a courthouse lawyer from the mountain counties could become part of state politics, railroad expansion, coal development, and one of the most unusual legal fights in nineteenth-century Virginia.
From Bedford County to the Mountains
Rufus Adolphus Ayers was born on May 20, 1849, the son of M. J. Ayers and Susan Lewis Wingfield Ayers. The near-contemporary biographical collection Men of Mark in Virginia describes him as a boy who lost his father young and learned early to work, study, and help support his family. His formal schooling was brief. He attended Goodson Academy at Bristol until the Civil War closed the school in 1861.
Like many boys of his generation, the war pulled him into adulthood early. As a teenager, he served in the Confederate army, first in an independent detached command and later in the field quartermaster department in East Tennessee. His military service was not the source of the title “General” that later followed him. That title came from his service as attorney general of Virginia, but the Civil War still formed part of the background of his generation. Ayers grew up in a world where defeat, debt, political realignment, and railroad dreams all shaped what came next.
After the war, he worked as a clerk, salesman, and merchant. The turn toward law came slowly. He studied while working, encouraged by family connections and by his own ambition. By the 1870s he had settled into the legal and political world of Estillville, the Scott County seat.
Estillville, Scott County, and the Making of a Lawyer
Estillville was not a large place, but it was important. It sat near Big Moccasin Gap, along old routes of travel, trade, and migration. The courthouse gave the town its rhythm. Lawyers, merchants, farmers, witnesses, officeholders, and travelers moved through its streets on court days, bringing news from the surrounding valleys and from the wider state.
Ayers entered this setting at the right time. In 1875, he was elected commonwealth’s attorney for Scott County and served four years. The office placed him in the center of local law enforcement and courtroom life. It also gave him visibility among voters, county officials, and the Democratic political network of Southwest Virginia.
During these same years, he held legislative-related posts in Richmond as clerk of the committee on finance and reading clerk of the House of Delegates. These were not glamorous offices, but they mattered. A reading clerk heard the machinery of state government up close. Bills, amendments, motions, disputes, and political alliances passed across the desk. For a young lawyer from Scott County, it was a practical education in power.
Ayers was also connected to the local press. Men of Mark in Virginia identifies him as editor and proprietor of the Scott County Banner, a weekly newspaper published at the courthouse. Surviving issues should be checked in newspaper repositories and local collections, because they may preserve Ayers’s early voice. Even without a full run of the paper, the detail is important. In nineteenth-century Appalachia, a lawyer who controlled a newspaper had more than a business. He had a platform.
Railroads, Coal, and the View Toward Big Stone Gap
Ayers did not see Scott County as isolated. He saw it as a gateway. That word became part of the local landscape.
The Gate City Historic District nomination explains that the town received its present name in 1886, when Rufus A. Ayers pointed out that its position near Big Moccasin Gap made it the “Gate Way to the West.” The renaming was more than a change on paper. It captured how late nineteenth-century boosters wanted the world to see the town. Gate City stood between older settlement and newer industrial ambition. Roads, rivers, gaps, and railroads made it part of a larger regional story.
Ayers was already thinking in those terms before the town took the name. In 1876, he prepared the charter for a railroad between Bristol and Big Stone Gap, and in 1877 he helped organize the company that began its construction. In 1881, he was instrumental in organizing the Virginia Coal and Iron Company, which became one of the great coal and land companies in Virginia.
These ventures show why Ayers cannot be understood only as a lawyer or politician. He belonged to the generation that imagined Southwest Virginia as a region of coal, iron, timber, railroads, banks, and outside investment. To some, men like Ayers were builders who connected the mountains to capital and markets. To others, they helped open the door to extractive industries that changed Appalachian land and labor for generations. Both things can be true.
Attorney General of Virginia
In 1885, Virginia Democrats nominated Rufus A. Ayers for attorney general on the ticket headed by Fitzhugh Lee for governor. Ayers won and served from January 1, 1886, to January 1, 1890. His term came during one of the most bitter political and legal conflicts in postwar Virginia, the long fight over the state debt.
Before the Civil War, Virginia had taken on large debts for internal improvements. After the war and the creation of West Virginia, the question of repayment became explosive. Bondholders held coupons that were supposed to be receivable for taxes. The state, struggling to protect its treasury, passed laws making those coupons harder to use. The fight divided Virginia politics and produced years of litigation.
Ayers became one of the central figures in the conflict. In 1887, a federal court issued an order restraining Ayers and others from bringing certain suits under Virginia law against taxpayers who had tendered tax-receivable coupons. Ayers chose to test the order. He was found in contempt, fined, and ordered into custody after refusing to comply.
The resulting case, In re Ayers, went to the United States Supreme Court. In December 1887, the Court ruled that the federal proceeding was, in substance, a suit against the State of Virginia and therefore barred by the Eleventh Amendment. The injunction was held void, and the imprisonment of Ayers and the other state officers was illegal.
For Ayers, the case became the defining public drama of his career. In the language of the time, supporters praised him as a defender of Virginia’s rights. The General Assembly commended his conduct, and Governor Fitzhugh Lee sent him a letter praising the spirit that allowed him to look “through the bars of a jail” in defense of Virginia’s constitutional position.
The episode also made him famous. The Scott County lawyer had gone from a courthouse town in the mountains to the center of a national constitutional case.
Back to Southwest Virginia
Ayers did not remain permanently in Richmond politics. After his term as attorney general, he returned to the mountains and to business. The National Register nomination for the Southwest Virginia Museum Historical State Park states that Ayers and his family moved from Gate City to Big Stone Gap in 1895. By then, Big Stone Gap had become one of the great boom towns of the southern mountains.
Investors and promoters believed the town might become the “Pittsburgh of the South,” a center of coal, iron, coke, railroads, and manufacturing. Ayers was one of the men who tried to make that vision real. He helped organize companies, banks, a tannery, coal and land ventures, a telephone company, and other businesses. He was connected to the Big Stone Gap Improvement Company and to the Big Stone Gap Post. In local memory, he became one of the best-known symbols of the town’s boom years.
His legal skill also remained valuable. In 1893, after leaving the attorney general’s office, Ayers appeared as counsel for Virginia in Virginia v. Tennessee, a United States Supreme Court boundary case involving the long state line between the two states. The case did not give Virginia the result it wanted, but it shows that Ayers remained a lawyer of statewide significance.
The House on Poplar Hill
The building most closely associated with Rufus A. Ayers today is the stone house in Big Stone Gap that now houses the Southwest Virginia Museum Historical State Park. The National Register nomination identifies it as the Rufus A. Ayers House and states that it was built in 1894 to 1895. The house stands at 10 West First Street North and was built of brown sandstone on a limestone basement story. Its Queen Anne form, stonework, oak interior, carriage house, and stone wall reflected the confidence of the boom period.
The house also marks Ayers’s transition from Scott County public man to Wise County industrial promoter. His earlier principal residence was in Gate City, but the Big Stone Gap house became the physical monument to the second half of his career.
After Ayers’s death, the property passed through other hands. C. Bascom Slemp, a powerful Republican congressman from Virginia’s Ninth District and later secretary to President Calvin Coolidge, purchased the house in 1929. In 1946, the Commonwealth of Virginia acquired it, and two years later it opened as a museum.
That museum preserves more than one man’s house. It preserves a chapter of Southwest Virginia when boosters, investors, lawyers, railroad men, coal operators, and mountain communities all collided in the making of modern Appalachia.
Later Politics and a Troubled Convention
Ayers returned to public life at times after his attorney general years. He was a delegate to the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1901 to 1902. That convention is an important but troubling part of Virginia history. The Constitution of 1902 disfranchised thousands of poor white voters and nearly eliminated the African American electorate in the state. Any honest account of Virginia public men from that generation has to place them in that context.
Ayers’s legacy, like the age he lived in, is complicated. He was a self-made lawyer, a powerful advocate for Southwest Virginia development, and a central figure in a major constitutional case. He was also part of a Democratic political order that narrowed political participation in Virginia and helped shape the Jim Crow era.
The value of studying him is not that his life was simple. It is that his life connects so many strands of Appalachian and Virginia history at once.
Death and Memory
Rufus A. Ayers died in 1926. By then, the world he had helped create had already changed. The railroad and coal boom had brought growth, money, and infrastructure, but also labor conflict, land consolidation, environmental change, and dependency on outside markets. Gate City remained the county seat of Scott County. Big Stone Gap remained one of the most historically important towns in Southwest Virginia. Ayers was linked to both.
In Scott County, his story belongs to the courthouse, the local press, the legal profession, and the renaming of Gate City. In Wise County, it belongs to the stone house, coal and iron promotion, banking, railroads, and the Big Stone Gap boom. In Virginia law, it belongs to In re Ayers, the 1887 Supreme Court case that made a mountain lawyer part of Eleventh Amendment history.
Why Rufus A. Ayers Matters
Rufus A. Ayers matters because he shows how Appalachian history was never cut off from state and national history. The same man who practiced law in Scott County also stood before the United States Supreme Court. The same man who helped promote railroads through the mountains also edited a local newspaper at the courthouse. The same man remembered through a museum in Big Stone Gap first built his public career in Estillville and Gate City.
His life followed the roads, gaps, and rail lines of Southwest Virginia. It began in the hardship of a fatherless boyhood, passed through the Civil War and courthouse law, rose into statewide politics, and returned to the mountains in the age of coal and industrial ambition.
For Appalachian history, Ayers is more than a name in a list of attorneys general. He is a reminder that places like Scott County were not merely on the edge of Virginia’s story. They produced lawyers, editors, builders, politicians, and promoters who helped decide what the Commonwealth and the mountain South would become.
Sources & Further Reading
United States Supreme Court. In re Ayers, 123 U.S. 443. 1887. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/123/443/
United States Supreme Court. In re Ayers, 123 U.S. 443. Library of Congress PDF. 1887. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep123/usrep123443/usrep123443.pdf
United States Supreme Court. McGahey v. Virginia, 135 U.S. 662. 1890. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/135/662/
United States Supreme Court. Virginia v. Tennessee, 148 U.S. 503. 1893. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/148/503/
Tyler, Lyon Gardiner, ed. Men of Mark in Virginia: Ideals of American Life; A Collection of Biographies of the Leading Men in the State. Vol. 2. Washington, D.C.: Men of Mark Publishing Company, 1907. https://books.google.com/books?id=tVYDAAAAYAAJ
Pezzoni, J. Daniel. National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Southwest Virginia Museum Historical State Park. Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 2002. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/101-0002_SW_VA_Museum_Historical_State_Park_2002_NRHP_nomination.pdf
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Southwest Virginia Museum Historical State Park.” Virginia Landmarks Register, 2002. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/101-0002/
Malvasi, Meg Greene. National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Gate City Historic District. Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 2010. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/221_5010_Gate_City_HD_2010_FINAL_Nomination.pdf
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Big Stone Gap Downtown Historic District. 2018. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/101-5002_BigStoneGapDowntownHD_2018_NRHP_FINAL.pdf
Encyclopedia Virginia. “Attorneys General of Virginia.” Virginia Humanities. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/attorneys-general-of-virginia/
Encyclopedia Virginia. “Constitutional Convention, Virginia, 1901 to 1902.” Virginia Humanities. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/constitutional-convention-virginia-1901-1902/
Virginia. Report of the Proceedings and Debates of the Constitutional Convention, State of Virginia. Richmond: Hermitage Press, 1906. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100338169
Brenaman, Jacob. A History of Virginia Conventions. Richmond: J. L. Hill Printing Company, 1902. https://archive.org/details/historyofvirgini00bren
Brock, R. A., and Virgil A. Lewis. Virginia and Virginians: Eminent Virginians. Richmond and Toledo: H. H. Hardesty, 1888. https://archive.org/details/virginiavirgini00broc
Johnson, Charles A. A Narrative History of Wise County, Virginia. Norton, VA: Norton Press, 1938. https://archive.org/details/narrativehistory00john
Eller, Ronald D. Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880–1930. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982. https://books.google.com/books?id=ld4YAAAAYAAJ
Dunn, William R. “An Attorney General Goes to Jail.” Virginia Cavalcade 21, no. 2, Autumn 1971. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uva.x000584805
Harman, Nancy. “Rufus A. Ayers, Promoter of Southwest Virginia.” Historical Society of Southwest Virginia. https://sites.rootsweb.com/~vahsswv/historicalsketches/ayersrufus.html
Fleenor, Lawrence J., Jr. “Biography of Rufus Adolphus Ayers.” Big Stone Gap Publishing, 2021. https://www.bigstonegappublishing.net/BIOGRAPHY_OF_RUFUS_ADOLPHUS_AYERS.pdf
Find a Grave. “Rufus Adolphus Ayers.” Memorial ID 8947455. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/8947455/rufus-adolphus-ayers
FamilySearch. “Rufus Adolphus Ayers, 1849–1926.” https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/LHZ6-657/rufus-adolphus-ayers-1849-1926
The New York Times. “The Ticket Completed; Virginia Democrats Ready for the Campaign.” July 31, 1885. https://www.nytimes.com/1885/07/31/archives/the-ticket-completed-virginia-democrats-ready-for-the-campaign.html
The New York Times. “Virginia’s Imprisoned Lawyers.” October 11, 1887. https://www.nytimes.com/1887/10/11/archives/virginias-imprisoned-lawyers.html
The New York Times. “The Virginia Coupon Case.” December 6, 1887. https://www.nytimes.com/1887/12/06/archives/the-virginia-coupon-case-a-decision-in-favor-of-the-commonwealth.html
The New York Times. “Virginia Sues Tennessee.” March 9, 1893. https://www.nytimes.com/1893/03/09/archives/virginia-sues-tennessee-the-old-dominion-state-wants-a-slice-of.html
Library of Congress. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Search terms: “Rufus A. Ayers,” “R. A. Ayers,” “Attorney General Ayers,” “Gate City,” and “Big Stone Gap.” https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/
Virginia Chronicle. Library of Virginia. Search terms: “Rufus A. Ayers,” “R. A. Ayers,” “Scott County Banner,” “Big Stone Gap Post,” and “Gate City Herald.” https://virginiachronicle.com/
Author Note: Rufus A. Ayers’s story is best read as both a Scott County biography and a Southwest Virginia development story. His life connects Gate City law, Virginia politics, Big Stone Gap coal promotion, and one of the most unusual Supreme Court episodes involving a Virginia attorney general.
Author Note: