Abstract
One hundred and fifty years later, the people of Wythe County, Virginia, still talk about the fabled ride of Molly Tynes that saved Wytheville and the lead mines close by. Molly, a cultured young woman who had attended college, was 26 years old that summer of 1863. She had come back home to help her father, Samuel Tynes, take care of her invalid mother on the family farm in southwestern Virginia. That same summer, Federal planners had determined to dispatch a raid deep into the very same country. The objectives were to attack Wytheville, eliminate the lead operations a few miles south of town at Austinvlle and the salt works at Saltville, and sever the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad.
“The Yankees are coming at dawn”
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Whisonant, R.C. (2015). The Lead Mines Under Attack. In: Arming the Confederacy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14508-2_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14508-2_7
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