Appalachian Figures Series – The Story of Charles T. Duncan of Lee, Virginia
On the last Wednesday of September 1915, Judge Charles T. Duncan stood before a crowd at Gate City and helped Scott County remember its first hundred years. The occasion was the county’s centennial. Duncan was old by then, a veteran of the Civil War, a former judge, and a Jonesville lawyer whose name had been familiar in the courtrooms of far southwest Virginia for decades.
That evening, after the public exercises were over, he stayed at the home of J. M. Johnson, described in the newspaper as a lifelong friend. The men talked late into the night. Duncan appeared to be in good health. Some time after that conversation, a member of the household entered the room and found him dead.
The Big Stone Gap Post carried the news under the heading “Judge Duncan Dies Suddenly.” It remembered him as a Jonesville jurist, a Confederate soldier of the 37th Virginia Regiment, and a man who had greeted hundreds of friends during the centennial events only hours before his death. His body was taken back to Jonesville, the Lee County town where he had built his law practice and public life.
Duncan’s story belongs to more than one county. He was tied by birth and family memory to Scott County, by law and public service to Lee County, and by Reconstruction politics to the wider story of Virginia after the Civil War. The old judge who died after a centennial address had lived through the breakup of the old commonwealth, the war in the mountains and valleys, the prisoner camps of the North, and the hard politics of rebuilding Virginia.
From Scott County Roots to War
Charles Taylor Duncan was born on July 9, 1838. Sources differ in small but important ways over the exact place of his birth. Some later summaries place him at Jonesville, while contemporary newspaper memory described him as born and reared in Scott County. That uncertainty is worth noting, because Duncan’s life crossed the county line often enough that both places claimed part of him.
The Duncan family belonged to the old southwest Virginia world of farmers, lawyers, soldiers, and local officeholders. The region was still young in the nineteenth century. Lee County had been formed from Russell County in 1792, while Scott County had been formed in 1814 from parts of Lee, Russell, and Washington counties. Families, roads, courts, and political loyalties often reached across those borders.
By the time Duncan came of age, Jonesville was a small but important courthouse town. Gate City, then known in earlier years as Estillville, stood to the northeast in Scott County. Between those places ran the local world that shaped him. It was a world of mountain roads, county courts, family reputation, and public speech. Duncan would later become known in all of those settings.
When Virginia left the Union in 1861, Duncan joined the Confederate army. He mustered into Company D of the 37th Virginia Infantry at Estillville on May 10, 1861. Like many early volunteers, he entered at the beginning as a private, but his education and local standing soon pushed him into positions of responsibility.
With the 37th Virginia
The 37th Virginia Infantry drew heavily from southwest Virginia. Its men came from the same mountain counties that Duncan knew best, and the regiment served in some of the hardest campaigns of the eastern war. Duncan was appointed second lieutenant in August 1861 and served for a time on the staff of General William B. Taliaferro. After a spring 1862 reorganization, he returned to the ranks, then rose again. By May 1862 he was a sergeant, and by July he had been commissioned third lieutenant.
The war carried Duncan far from the courthouse roads of Lee and Scott counties. He was connected with Colonel Samuel Vance Fulkerson, another southwest Virginian whose death became part of Duncan’s remembered story. Fulkerson was mortally wounded during the Seven Days fighting around Gaines’ Mill, a battle also remembered in older accounts as Cold Harbor. Later obituary memory said Duncan was with him in those last moments.
By September 1862, Duncan and the 37th Virginia were in Maryland. At Sharpsburg, known in the North as Antietam, the regiment suffered casualties during one of the bloodiest days of the war. Contemporary casualty lists in the Abingdon Virginian and later military summaries identify Duncan as wounded there on September 17, 1862. The wound was described as slight, but it placed his name among the southwest Virginia men marked by that terrible campaign.
The 37th Virginia continued through the long middle years of the war. Duncan’s own service ended in captivity. On May 12, 1864, during the fighting at Spotsylvania Court House, he was captured. Prisoner of war records summarized by later military researchers trace his path through Belle Plain, Point Lookout, and Fort Delaware. He was not released until June 16, 1865, after taking the oath of allegiance.
For Duncan, captivity became a turning point. Later accounts say that while he was imprisoned he studied law. Whether that study began formally or informally, the direction of his postwar life was set. He had gone into the war as a young mountain soldier. He returned to southwest Virginia as a man who would make his living at the bar.
Reconstruction and the Conservative Convention
The war ended, but Virginia’s political struggle did not. Former Confederates came home to a state under federal Reconstruction, with questions of suffrage, civil rights, public education, military rule, and the future of local government still unsettled. Duncan entered that world as both a veteran and a public man.
In 1867 and 1868, Virginia held a constitutional convention under Reconstruction authority. Voters from Lee, Scott, and Wise counties sent delegates to that convention, and Duncan served as a Conservative representative from that far southwest district. His presence there tied him to one of the most important political moments in nineteenth century Virginia.
The convention was not a quiet gathering. It debated how Virginia would reenter the Union and how the state would define citizenship after slavery. Republican delegates, including Black Virginians and white Unionists, pushed a Reconstruction constitution. Conservative delegates resisted many of those changes and worked to shape the future of the state in their own direction.
Duncan’s name appears in connection with an 1868 pamphlet titled Address of the Conservative Members of the Late State Convention, to the People of Virginia. The HathiTrust catalog identifies the pamphlet as signed by “Charles T. Duncan, of Scott,” along with other Conservative members. That small printed address matters because it places Duncan directly inside the political fight over Reconstruction Virginia.
His role in the convention should not be treated as a footnote. For men like Duncan, the war had not simply ended at Appomattox. Its consequences continued in courtrooms, polling places, newspapers, and convention halls. Duncan’s later public career in Lee County grew out of that unsettled postwar world.
A Jonesville Lawyer
After the war, Duncan made Jonesville his professional home. Later summaries describe him as practicing law beginning in the 1870s. He became commonwealth’s attorney for Lee County in the later 1870s, then developed a reputation as a courtroom lawyer in southwest Virginia.
Jonesville was the kind of place where a lawyer’s name could become part of daily geography. Court days brought farmers, merchants, witnesses, defendants, creditors, and county officers into town. A lawyer who stayed long enough became woven into the county’s memory. Duncan did stay. By the time he died, newspapers could call him “Judge Duncan” without needing to explain the title.
His legal work also moved him into public office. Chataigne’s Virginia Gazetteer and Classified Business Directory for 1888 to 1889 lists the Lee County county court meeting at Jonesville on the first Monday of each month and names C. T. Duncan as judge of the county court. That directory entry is a valuable contemporary check on his judicial service. It shows that Duncan was not only remembered later as a judge. He was listed as one in a printed directory during the period.
The same directory places him in the practical machinery of Lee County government. Around him were clerks, sheriffs, treasurers, surveyors, commonwealth’s attorneys, and other local officers. These were the men who carried county life forward in the late nineteenth century. In an Appalachian courthouse town, public authority often lived less in distant capitals than in rooms where land was recorded, debts were argued, juries were seated, and criminal cases were tried.
C. T. Duncan’s Residence
One of the clearest local traces of Duncan appears not in an obituary or a biography, but in the legal description of Jonesville itself. In 1901, the Virginia General Assembly passed an act incorporating the town of Jonesville. The boundary description used local landmarks to define the town limits. Among those landmarks was “C. T. Duncan’s residence.”
That phrase is small, but it tells us something important. Duncan’s home was recognizable enough in Jonesville to serve as a point in the town charter. His residence had become part of the map.
For local history, such details are often more revealing than grand claims. They show how a public figure lived in the remembered landscape of a community. Duncan was not only a name in a military roster or convention pamphlet. He was a man whose house stood where neighbors knew it, near the roads, lots, branches, and springs that defined early twentieth century Jonesville.
By then, Duncan had lived long enough to see southwest Virginia change around him. Railroads, coal development, new towns, and outside capital were reshaping the region. The older courthouse culture of Lee and Scott counties remained, but it now sat beside a new industrial Appalachia. Duncan belonged to the earlier order, yet he survived into the modernizing age.
The Last Address
In September 1915, Scott County marked the centennial of its formation. Duncan went to Gate City to take part in the ceremonies. That was fitting. If Jonesville had been the center of his law practice, Scott County still claimed him by memory and family connection.
The obituary account says Duncan delivered a “great centennial address” and took an active part in the exercises of the day. He greeted hundreds of friends. Those details create a vivid final scene. An old soldier and judge, dressed for public ceremony, stood before a mountain county and spoke about its first century. Then, within hours, his own life ended.
The Big Stone Gap Post reported that his second wife and several children survived him. His body was returned to Jonesville. Cemetery sources place Judge Charles T. Duncan in Jonesville Cemetery, bringing his story back to the Lee County town where he had practiced law, held court, and lived long enough for his home to become a boundary marker.
There is a kind of Appalachian symmetry in that ending. Duncan died in one courthouse county after speaking about its history and was carried back to another courthouse town where his own history had been made. His life had followed the old roads between Lee and Scott, between war and law, between public memory and private residence.
Why Charles T. Duncan’s Story Matters
Charles T. Duncan is not one of the best known figures in Virginia history, but his life touches several major themes in Appalachian history. He shows how the Civil War reached deeply into the mountain counties of southwest Virginia. He shows how Confederate veterans returned to public life during Reconstruction. He shows how courthouse towns like Jonesville shaped regional leadership long before modern highways and industries remade the landscape.
His record also reminds us that local history is often built from scattered pieces. A casualty notice in an Abingdon newspaper. A compiled service record. A prisoner of war trail through Point Lookout and Fort Delaware. A political pamphlet from 1868. A county directory naming a judge. A town charter that uses a man’s residence as a landmark. An obituary written after a sudden death away from home.
Taken together, those pieces restore the outline of a life. Duncan was a soldier, but he was not only a soldier. He was a lawyer, but not only a lawyer. He was a Conservative delegate in the Reconstruction era, a Lee County judge, a Jonesville resident, and a speaker called upon to help Scott County remember its past.
The mountains remember people in layers. Some are remembered by battle. Some by office. Some by the house they lived in. Some by the words they spoke near the end of life. Charles T. Duncan left traces in all of those places, and through them his story still belongs to Lee County, Scott County, and the wider history of southwest Virginia.
Sources & Further Reading
United States War Department. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Series 1, Vol. 10, Part 2. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1884. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000625514
“Charles Taylor Duncan.” Antietam on the Web. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://antietam.aotw.org/officers.php?officer_id=18546
Virginia Constitutional Convention. Address of the Conservative Members of the Late State Convention, to the People of Virginia. Richmond, VA, 1868. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100228333
“Page Two.” World News, September 30, 1915. Virginia Chronicle. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/cgi-bin/virginia?a=d&d=TWN19150930.1.2
“Judge Duncan Dies Suddenly.” The Big Stone Gap Post, October 6, 1915. Transcribed in Genealogy Trails, Lee County, Virginia Obituaries and Death Notices. https://genealogytrails.com/vir/lee/obituaries.html
Chataigne, J. H. Chataigne’s Virginia Gazetteer and Classified Business Directory, 1888 to 1889. Richmond, VA: J. H. Chataigne, 1888. Transcribed at New River Notes. https://www.newrivernotes.com/chataignes-virginia-gazetteer-1888-1889/
Virginia General Assembly. Charter of the Town of Jonesville, Virginia, 1901, chapter 107. Virginia Law, Legislative Information System. https://law.lis.virginia.gov/charters/jonesville/
“Virginia in the American Civil War: Newspapers and Magazines.” Library of Virginia Research Guides. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://lva-virginia.libguides.com/civil-war/newspapers
“Birth, Marriage, and Death Registers.” Library of Virginia Research Guides. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://lva-virginia.libguides.com/bmd-microfilm/registers
“Charles Taylor Duncan.” FamilySearch Family Tree. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/2MTZ-NRL/charles-t.-duncan-1838-1915
“Judge Charles T. Duncan.” Find a Grave Memorial no. 125450279. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/125450279
Addington, Robert M. History of Scott County, Virginia. Kingsport, TN: Kingsport Press, 1932. https://www.seekingmyroots.com/members/files/H011614.pdf
Addington, Robert M. History of Scott County, Virginia. Reprint ed. Johnson City, TN: Overmountain Press, 1992. https://books.google.com/books/about/History_of_Scott_County_Virginia.html?id=n2pWQWkA1cUC
Rankin, Thomas M. 37th Virginia Infantry. Lynchburg, VA: H. E. Howard, 1987. https://www.worldcat.org/title/37th-Virginia-Infantry/oclc/15630987
Leonard, Cynthia Miller. The Virginia General Assembly, 1619–1978: A Bicentennial Register of Members. Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1978. https://www.worldcat.org/title/4751571
“Gateway to the West, Part 8.” RootsWeb Duncan Research Files. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://homepages.rootsweb.com/~duncanrw/gatewayseries/gatewaywestpt8.htm
“Scott County, Virginia Genealogy.” FamilySearch Wiki. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Scott_County%2C_Virginia_Genealogy
“Appalachian Counties Served by ARC.” Appalachian Regional Commission. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.arc.gov/appalachian-counties-served-by-arc/
“Virginia.” Appalachian Regional Commission. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.arc.gov/appalachian-states/virginia/
“Charles T. Duncan.” Wikipedia. Accessed June 11, 2026. Use only as a source map, not as final authority. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_T._Duncan
Author Note: Charles T. Duncan’s life is a reminder that courthouse history can carry the weight of war, politics, family, and public memory. His story belongs especially to Lee and Scott counties, where one man’s path crossed the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the local law of southwest Virginia.