Appalachian Figures Series – The Story of Auburn Lorenzo Pridemore of Lee, Virginia
Jonesville sits in a narrow old valley where law, politics, roads, and war all passed close together. In the nineteenth century, when Lee County was still a hard mountain county at the far southwestern end of Virginia, the county seat became the working home of Auburn Lorenzo Pridemore.
He was not born in Lee County, but much of his public life became tied to it. Pridemore was born in Scott County, Virginia, on June 27, 1837. He grew up in a region where formal schooling could be limited, where farm life, local reputation, and political allegiance often shaped a man’s future as much as any classroom. The official congressional biography says he received a limited education, completed preparatory studies, and later entered law.
By the time he died in Jonesville on May 17, 1900, Pridemore had been a Confederate officer, a lawyer, a Virginia state senator, and a member of Congress. His name appears in military records, legislative journals, newspaper politics, congressional directories, local histories, court records, and the memory of the Battle of Jonesville.
His life followed the path of many ambitious mountain men of his generation, but on a larger public stage. He came through the Civil War with rank and reputation, entered law during Reconstruction, served in Richmond, and then carried the Ninth District of Virginia into the Forty-fifth Congress.
From Scott County To The Lee County Bar
Pridemore’s early life belonged to Scott County, but Jonesville became the town most associated with his career. After the Civil War, he studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1867. He began practicing in Jonesville, the Lee County seat.
That detail matters. In a courthouse town, the law was not separate from local power. Lawyers handled land, debt, estates, business disputes, political alliances, and county affairs. A good lawyer in a place like Jonesville stood near the center of public life.
Pridemore’s later work suggests that he understood both the old courthouse world and the new industrial future that Southwest Virginia was beginning to imagine. After the war, the region was full of questions about railroads, coal, iron, outside investors, land titles, and the rebuilding of political authority. A lawyer with military standing and political ambition could become a bridge between county interests and state or federal power.
Before that postwar career could begin, however, Pridemore first became known in war.
A Confederate Officer In Southwest Virginia
When the Civil War came, Pridemore raised a company of volunteer infantry for Confederate service. His official congressional biography says he served as captain until June 1862, then rose to major, lieutenant colonel of infantry, and colonel of cavalry.
The unit most often connected with him was the 64th Virginia. Sources refer to it in more than one way, including the 64th Virginia Mounted Infantry and the 64th Virginia Cavalry. That shifting name reflects the mixed character of the fighting in the mountains. Men moved on foot, on horseback, through gaps, valleys, roads, and rough country where the line between infantry, mounted infantry, and cavalry was not always neat.
The National Park Service’s unit history identifies Auburn L. Pridemore and Campbell Slemp among the field officers of the 64th Virginia Mounted Infantry. It also notes how badly reduced the command became by the final year of the war. In April 1864, the regiment had 268 effectives. By April 1865, fewer than fifty disbanded.
That tells a hard story. Southwest Virginia units faced not only battle, but disease, desertion, capture, poor supplies, divided local loyalties, and long service in a region where the front could feel very close to home. The mountains were not a quiet backwater of the war. They were a contested borderland where armies, raiders, scouts, families, and local enemies crossed paths.
Pridemore’s best remembered military moment came at Jonesville in January 1864.
The Battle Of Jonesville
The Battle of Jonesville was fought on January 2 and 3, 1864. It came during a winter Confederate movement connected to the Cumberland Gap, one of the great strategic doorways between Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky.
Union forces held the Gap, and Confederate Brigadier General William E. “Grumble” Jones moved with a large mounted force toward Lee County. Virginia Tech’s Civil War driving tour describes Jones crossing the Clinch River with about 2,000 men and moving northwest toward the mountain pass. Union commanders sent Major Charles H. Beeres and the Sixteenth Illinois Cavalry toward Jonesville to find the Confederate force.
On January 2, Beeres drove several hundred of Lieutenant Colonel Pridemore’s Confederate troopers out of Jonesville. The Union men camped in town that night. In the early morning of January 3, Jones attacked from the west.
The fight turned against the Union force. The Confederates retook the town, and Beeres found himself trapped between Pridemore to the east and Jones to the west. The Union command surrendered. Virginia Tech’s summary says the Confederates captured 383 Union soldiers, three artillery pieces, and twenty-seven wagons.
For Lee County, it was one of the defining Civil War episodes. A historical marker in Jonesville later remembered the event by saying that General Jones, assisted by Colonel A. L. Pridemore, defeated and captured a Union force there.
The Confederate victory did not lead to the retaking of Cumberland Gap. Jones soon learned that Union forces there had been reinforced, making that goal unrealistic. Still, the Jonesville victory carried local weight. It strengthened Confederate control in Lee County and entered the county’s memory as the largest Civil War engagement in far Southwest Virginia.
For Pridemore, the battle helped preserve his place in local history. He was not the highest ranking officer on the field, but his position in the action made his name part of Jonesville’s wartime story.
From War To Law
When the war ended, Pridemore did what many former Confederate officers tried to do. He moved into public life.
His official congressional biography says he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates in 1865, though he did not take his seat. In the changed world after Appomattox, old authority did not pass smoothly into Reconstruction government. Former Confederates faced shifting restrictions, new political realities, and the struggle to reestablish influence.
Pridemore turned to law. In 1867 he was admitted to the bar and opened his practice in Jonesville. That work placed him back in a position of local importance. In a rural county seat, the lawyer’s office could become as political as the courthouse itself.
He built enough standing to win a seat in the Virginia Senate. He served from 1871 to 1875, representing a mountain district at a time when Virginia was still wrestling with debt, railroads, public schools, state power, and the political aftermath of war.
A contemporary political item in the Patriot and Herald in 1876 shows Pridemore defending his Senate record. He pointed readers back to the Senate journals for the four years he served and challenged critics to find evidence against him. It was the language of a man asking voters to judge him by the official record.
That was Pridemore’s political method in miniature. He did not present himself only as a soldier. He presented himself as a public servant whose record could be checked.
The Road To Congress
In 1876, voters sent Pridemore to Congress as a Democrat from Virginia’s Ninth District. The district stretched across the mountainous western end of the state, a place with its own political habits, local rivalries, and postwar struggles.
The Congressional Directory for the Forty-fifth Congress listed him as Auburn Lorenzo Pridemore of Jonesville, though one directory printing spelled the surname “Pridmore.” The official Biographical Directory says he served from March 4, 1877, to March 3, 1879.
His time in Congress was brief, but it placed a Jonesville lawyer from Lee County into the national record. He served during the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of the post-Reconstruction political order. Southern Democrats were returning to federal power, and former Confederates were reappearing in public office. Pridemore’s election was part of that larger shift.
For the mountains of Southwest Virginia, his congressional service also showed the continuing importance of the Ninth District. This was a region far from Richmond and Washington in geography, but not outside politics. Its leaders fought over roads, railroads, mining, taxation, debt, veterans, land, and the future of mountain counties.
Pridemore did not become a nationally famous congressman. His reputation remained more regional than national. Still, his presence in the Congressional Record and Congressional Directory shows the journey of a far Southwest Virginia figure from a mountain courthouse to the floor of the United States House.
A Mountain Politician In A Changing Region
Pridemore belonged to the generation that watched Southwest Virginia begin to change from a remote mountain region into a place eyed by railroad men, coal operators, iron developers, and land companies.
The old local world did not vanish. Farming, family networks, county courts, churches, and local politics still mattered deeply. But after the Civil War, Southwest Virginia also became part of a wider industrial imagination. Men spoke of rail lines into the coalfields, iron furnaces, outside investment, and new towns in the mountains.
Pridemore’s later legal work and public reputation fit that moment. He was a lawyer in Jonesville, but not merely a small town attorney. His name appears in legal and business contexts tied to land and industrial development. The Supreme Court case In re Lehigh Mining and Manufacturing Company, decided in 1895, involved land, corporate organization, and federal jurisdiction in the Western District of Virginia. A. L. Pridemore was listed among counsel connected with the case in the U.S. Reports.
That kind of legal work shows the region’s turn toward land litigation and resource development. As coal and iron interests grew in Southwest Virginia, lawyers became essential figures. They sorted claims, argued title, represented companies and landholders, and helped shape the legal groundwork for industrial Appalachia.
In that sense, Pridemore’s life did not end with the war or even with Congress. His career continued in the courthouse world that helped prepare the mountains for the coming boom.
Death In Jonesville
After his congressional term ended, Pridemore returned to the practice of law in Jonesville. He remained there for the rest of his life.
He died in Jonesville on May 17, 1900. He was buried in Hill Cemetery, the same town where he had practiced law, built his political career, and been remembered for his role in the Civil War.
His grave closed a life that had crossed nearly every major current of nineteenth-century Southwest Virginia. He had been born before the war, fought through it, practiced law after it, served in the Virginia Senate during Reconstruction, represented the Ninth District in Congress, and lived long enough to see the region moving toward coal, railroads, and industrial capital.
Remembering Auburn Lorenzo Pridemore
Auburn Lorenzo Pridemore is not one of the best known figures in Appalachian history, but he is the kind of figure who helps explain how mountain counties worked in the nineteenth century.
He was local and national at the same time. He belonged to Jonesville and Lee County, but he also belonged to the Congressional Directory. He was remembered at the Battle of Jonesville, but he was also recorded in Senate journals, court records, and federal biography. He came from a world of limited schooling and local opportunity, yet rose through law, war, and politics into a place of public authority.
His story also shows how the Civil War shaped leadership in Southwest Virginia. Military service gave some men rank, reputation, and networks that carried into Reconstruction politics. Courthouse practice gave them another path to power. For Pridemore, those paths joined in Jonesville.
The town remained the anchor. It was the place where he practiced law, the place tied to his wartime memory, and the place where he died. If his name belongs anywhere, it belongs first to the valleys and courthouse streets of Lee County, where the long nineteenth century moved through one man’s life in war, law, and politics.
Sources & Further Reading
Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. “PRIDEMORE, Auburn Lorenzo.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://bioguideretro.congress.gov/Home/MemberDetails?memIndex=P000535
U.S. House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives. “PRIDEMORE, Auburn Lorenzo.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://history.house.gov/People/Listing/P/PRIDEMORE,-Auburn-Lorenzo-(P000535)/
United States Congress. Congressional Directory for the First Session of the Forty-Fifth Congress. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1877. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CDIR-1877-10-18/pdf/CDIR-1877-10-18.pdf
United States Congress. Congressional Directory for the Second Session of the Forty-Fifth Congress. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1878. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CDIR-1878-02-07/pdf/CDIR-1878-02-07.pdf
U.S. House of Representatives. List of the Members of the House of Representatives of the United States and Their Places of Residence, 45th Cong., 3rd sess., H. Misc. Doc. 1. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1878. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/SERIALSET-01861_00_00-002-0001-0000/pdf/SERIALSET-01861_00_00-002-0001-0000.pdf
United States Congress. Congressional Record: House, 45th Cong., 2nd sess., May 23, 1878, 3724, 3725, 3729. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1878. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.govinfo.gov/app/collection/crecb/_crecb/Volume%20007%20%281878%29
Virginia General Assembly, Senate. Journal of the Senate of Virginia. Richmond: Commonwealth of Virginia, 1871 to 1875. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009787857
Virginia General Assembly. The General Assembly of Virginia, July 30, 1619 to January 11, 1978: A Bicentennial Register of Members. Compiled by Cynthia Miller Leonard. Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1978. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000769364
Pridemore, A. L. “To the People of the Ninth Congressional District.” Patriot and Herald, July 20, 1876. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=PH18760720.1.2
The Daily State Journal. “The General Assembly.” December 31, 1873. Library of Congress. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn84024670/1873-12-31/ed-1/?st=text
Gate City Herald. “Pridemore.” September 27, 1934. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=GCH19340927.1.6
United States War Department. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Volume 32, Part 1. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1891. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://archive.org/details/warofrebellionco32unit
Virginia Center for Civil War Studies. “Battle of Jonesville.” Virginia Tech. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://civilwar.vt.edu/programs/drivingtour/battleofjonesville.html
National Park Service. “64th Regiment, Virginia Mounted Infantry.” The Civil War: Battle Unit Details. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/search-battle-units-detail.htm?battleUnitCode=CVA0064RIT
FamilySearch. “64th Regiment, Virginia Mounted Infantry: Confederate.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/64th_Regiment%2C_Virginia_Mounted_Infantry_-_Confederate
USGenWeb Archives. “64th Virginia Infantry.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://files.usgwarchives.net/va/military/civilwar/rosters/va64th.txt
Fold3. “Auburn Lorenzo Pridemore.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.fold3.com/memorial/661174357
Find a Grave. “Auburn Lorenzo Pridemore.” Memorial ID 7932163. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/7932163/auburn-lorenzo-pridemore
Quillen, Rose S. “Colonel Auburn L. Pridemore, Eminent State Senator, Congressman.” Historical Sketches of Southwest Virginia. Southwest Virginia Historical Society. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://sites.rootsweb.com/~vahsswv/historicalsketches/pridemoreauburnl.html
Southwest Virginia Historical Society. “Historical Sketches of Southwest Virginia.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://sites.rootsweb.com/~vahsswv/historicalsketches/historicalsketches.html
Mize, Martha Grace Lowry. “Civil War in Southwestern Virginia.” The Lee County Story. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.theleecountystory.com/civil-war-in-southwestern-virginia/
Mize, Martha Grace. “History and Heritage Made Accessible: The Lee County, Virginia Story.” Honors thesis, University of Mississippi, 2017. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/hon_thesis/641
Confederate Veteran. Volume 30. Nashville, TN: S. A. Cunningham, 1922. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://archive.org/stream/confederateveter301922/confederateveter301922_djvu.txt
Historical Marker Database. “Jonesville.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=36028
In re Lehigh Mining and Manufacturing Company, 156 U.S. 322. U.S. Supreme Court, 1895. Library of Congress. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/item/usrep156322/
Lehigh Mining and Manufacturing Co. v. Kelly, 160 U.S. 327. U.S. Supreme Court, 1895. Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/160/327
McKnight, Brian D. Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813191973/contested-borderland/
Catron, Ada Grace. Early Records of Lee County, Virginia. AccessGenealogy. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://accessgenealogy.com/virginia/early-records-of-lee-county-virginia.htm
Civil War in the East. “64th Virginia Infantry Regiment.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://civilwarintheeast.com/confederate-regiments/virginia/64th-virginia-infantry-regiment/
Duncan, R. W., ed. “The Battle of Jonesville: 1864.” My Long Hunters. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.mylonghunters.info/battle-jonesville
Duncan, R. W., ed. “64th Virginia Mounted Infantry Regiment.” My Long Hunters. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.mylonghunters.info/64th-virginia-mounted-infantry-regiment
Author Note: Pridemore’s story reminds us that nineteenth-century Appalachian politics often grew out of courthouse towns, war service, and local reputation. I wrote this piece to connect his Jonesville life with the primary records that still preserve his name.