Many of you have been following my posts concerning Professor Hagy's 1966 thesis on Castle's Woods: Frontier Virginia Settlement, 1769-1799 written while he was a student at East Tennessee State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a Degree of Master of Arts (History) I was fortunate to secure an original copy of his thesis from a rare book dealer and subsequently offered to make copies for interested researchers. The thesis contained no copyright provisions but a couple of folks encouraged me to try to locate Professor Hagy, some 37 years after he published it. The results of my search are quite interesting, but before I tell you what happened let me first give a brief overview of the Castle's Woods settlement for those who are new to the list. "This thesis is a narrative account of the frontier settlement of Castle's Woods. The community is an interesting case study of the ideas of Frederick Jackson Turner regarding the frontier. Castle's Woods in many ways fits the pattern of the typical frontier community. Apparently first settled by a long hunter, Castle's Woods, like a magnet, drew westward the classic frontier types, hunters, farmers, speculators, surveyors, artisans, and preachers. Even some aristocrates settled there. The usual frontier customs and activities were observed in the community. These included a considerable amount of lawlessness. The greatest problem for the settlers in Castle's Woods was the Indians who were a menace from the time of the first settlement until nearly the end of the eighteenth century. After the Indian problem had been eliminated, the frontier stage quickly passed away...... A large amount of primary materials were used in this study. The most important sources were county records, state archives, national archives, and the Draper Manuscripts." The importance of Castle's Woods is twofold. First, it had its day of importa nce as a stepping stone to the West. Secondly, it is important as a case study of the American frontier. It was the first permanent settlement in Russell County, Virginia, founded in 1769 and located on the Clinch River. Castle's Woods was a stopping off place for folks on their way West. A generation or two earlier many of these settlers had been in the Shenandoah Valley around Augusta and Rockbridge Counties and before that Pennsylvania and Ireland. Soon they would leave southwest Virginia and begin to populate Kentucky, Tennessee and later Texas, Arkansas, and points north and west. These were the pioneers that made Walt Disney famous; Daniel Boone, Samuel Houston, David Crockett and many like Boone, paused briefly in Castle's Woods before heading out into the pages of history. So, where does one begin to look for someone 37 years after he writes a nice research paper? My 16 year old son looked up from his computer, said "whitepages.com" and in less than five minutes I was speaking with Professor Hagy who is now almost 67 and living the good life in central Florida. We had a nice chat and I thanked him for the work he had done and told him I was making copies of his thesis for genealogists on the internet and he said that he had no plans to reprint the thesis and to "copy away." We talked mostly about how important it was to preserve obscure source materials and what a great value the internet was to accomplishing that task. I have enjoyed seeing this project grow from finding a single copy of an important, somewhat obscure document to a situation where enough people have copies that it should always be available. As in the past I make the same offer again. If you are interested in obtaining a copy of Professor Hagy's thesis please contact me privately at cscunc@aol.com for details. Regards, Robert Cowan 525 Harrogate Rd. Matthews, North Carolina 28105 If I send this post to your list it means one of two things. Your surname is in the document OR there is a very high probability your county was settled by some of the people who lived in Castle's Woods. (On your Virginia map find Abingdon and look a little to the west. You see the small community of Castlewood which is how the named evolved.) Some of the surnames are: Cowan, Walker, Russell, Montgomery, Porter, Moore, Campbell, Stuart/Stewart, Houston, Shelby, Anderson, Smith, Gist, Pitman, Robinson, Boles, Stapelton, Thompson, Fleming, Floyd, Kincaid, Knox, Woods, Fraley, Castle, Snoddy, Stoner, Dickenson, Bickley, Boone, Scott, Bryan, Preston, Christian, Crockett, Estill, Bledsoe, Lynch, Hamlin, Lewis, Harman, Bell, Gillespie, Cunningham, Osbourne, English, Kilgore, Green, Brown, Duncan, King, Johnson, Black, Davis, Wier, Kerr, McCorkle, Hill, Phillips, Best, Asbury, Alley, Walls, Jones, Barnett, Calhoun, Beavers, Ward, Price, Bowen, Carter, Logan, Kennedy and others.....