Adrion M. Hurt - 1823 - 1840

Tragic Loss of the First Born

Ira and Eliza Hurt began their life together  just before Christmas  1821.  Their first home was at "Hamlet Hill" located in the Brown Hill district of Franklin County.    Though  Eliza was only thirteen years old at the time, they spared no time in starting a family with their first child, a son they named Adrion, being born in April 1823.  The children continued to arrive regularly every other year or so with the last and twelfth one being born in 1852.  

It was probably during the 1830's that Ira Hurt began to seriously consider a business opportunity along the Kanawha River in West Virginia.  Salt was being mined there and men were making fortunes.   By this time, Ira's sister, Mary or "Polly" as she was called, and her husband, John McConihay were already living south of Charleston, WV on Field's Creek.  John was a  good business man and, besides his tobacco sales, his farm also offered natural resources like coal and timber, items essential to the developing saline industry on the Kanawha.   Ira Hurt may have been in the habit of trading or obtaining timber or other resources from John McConihay that required the use of his slaves for the purpose of labor or transportation between Charleston and Franklin County.  It was a common practice, also, to lease slave labor to mine owners who operated salt furnaces due to the demanding rate of the mining process.  Keeping the fires going twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week required shift work divided among strong hands who could withstand the rigorous task of stoking the fires to evaporate water out of the salt brine once it was pumped to the surface.  Could Ira Hurt's slaves have been leased to the saline operations when a cholera epidemic struck in 1840?   

Although records do not indicate Ira Hurt actually owning property in WV until 1838, it is possible that his black laborers were commissioned to the Charleston area for some purpose.  Perhaps they were sent or taken there during a visit to Ira's sister and her family when the tragedy struck, some sources saying it was typhus, others cholera.  Whatever the circumstances may have been, family tradition has it that their ill-fated return took the lives of some twenty of the Hurt slaves  and robbed from Ira and Eliza their first born son.  Adrion, whom Ira and Eliza loved very much, died of disease contracted from the slaves on March 06, 1840 at their home on Hamlet Hill in Franklin County, Virginia where he is also buried.

In the spring of 2001 the cemetery was located by the writer.  It is situated in a wooded area near the intersection of Holley Ridge Road and Horseshoe Point Road in Franklin County.  Click here for a full report of the findings.

Martha Jane Hurt - 1847 - 1864

First Wartime Casualty

Martha Jane Hurt was born 1847.  Her sister and playmate, Sarah Elizabeth, was just two years younger.   While her brothers were still away at war, Martha Jane contracted tuberculosis "consumption" and died in the hot summer month of August 1864.  Her mother and father must have been sick with worry about their sons on the front lines of the battles in which by now were concentrated around Richmond, Va.  Yet, tragedy struck first at home with the loss of their sixteen year old daughter who, herself, had waited anxiously for news from her brothers that they were well and would return to her safely.  Perhaps it was Martha Jane's death which prompted her father to choose the beautiful site overlooking the plantation's green fields and the mountains to the west in view of Cook's Knob for the family cemetery.   

Sarah Elizabeth Hurt  - 1849 - 1872

Disease Strikes again

Sarah Hurt, next to the youngest of Ira and Eliza's children, was born December 04, 1849.  She had watched her sister, Martha Jane, suffer and finally succumb to the dread consumption when she was just a girl at age fourteen.  She had experienced the joy and exhilaration of the safe return of all her brothers from the fighting of which they had been part for four long years.  At age 22, Sarah was finding hope and dreaming dreams again with her whole life ahead of her.  With the war over, her brothers and sisters were busy about their personal lives and starting families of their own.  The Hurt family and those around them were recovering from the turmoil of war and adapting to the many changes that had taken place in the way of life they had known.  

Yet, the decade of the 1870's marked the beginning of many painful events and difficult challenges for Ira and Eliza's family, one of them being another of their daughters stricken with consumption.  Sarah Elizabeth Hurt's battle ended on September 14, 1872.  She was laid to rest with her sister, Martha Jane, in the cemetery on the Hurt property in Franklin County, Virginia.