Iberian Publishing Company's On-Line Catalog:
Hardy County Virginia

WOLF HUNTERS ON THE VIRGINIA FRONTIER, 1776-1818 [bounty lists & certificates from Amherst, Augusta, Bath, Botetourt, Grayson, Greenbrier, Hampshire, Hardy, Mopntgomery, Patrick, Pendleton, Rockbridge, Russell, Shenandoah, Washington, and Wythe counties [dates vary] transcribed & edited by Karen Wagner Treacy. 8 1/2 x 11, vi, 169 pages, full name index.

Locating an ancestor on the Virginia frontier in the late colonial and early republican period can be a daunting task. As the historian and archivist Robert Clay once remarked in a lecture, an individual he was researching in Virginia’s frontier region "appeared in a random document one morning, fully grown, and disappeared the following morning never to be heard from again.”

Oftentimes, early frontiersmen created few records and left little trace of their passing. Nowhere is this more evident than in the rapidly changing frontier west of the Blue Ridge. Starting with a trickle of settlers, there probably were no more than 160 families residing west of the mountains by 1735. By 1776 and the American Revolution, the number of settlers had grown to tens of thousands, attracted by the rich soils and pasture lands of the Shenandoah Valley and beyond, into Kentucky.

As the new government sought to bring order to the region, parent counties like Augusta and Lunenburg, which originally were little more than artificial lines when first drawn by surveyors in the wilderness, underwent division and subdivision into smaller political units to accomodate the new settlers. The trio of counties on Virginia’s frontier in the early 1740s [Frederick, Augusta, Lunenburg] would be divided and further subdivided over the next seven decades into more than sixty political units.

Author Karen Treacy has discovered an enlightening and unexpected record in the bounty system for wolf hunters. Early farmers and herders sought legislative relief from the scourge of wolf packs. The Virginia legislature responded by establishing the bounty system. In a time when an average laborer’s earning was $6-10/month, the $1 to $6 or 100# tobacco from a wolf scalp (depending on the currency and inflation of the time) was an attractive economic draw for every class of frontiersman, even those constantly moving folk mentioned by Clay.

This book is an important record not only for the two and a half thousand individuals cited but also for a valuable historical window into the activities and growth of Virginia’s frontier society.


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[WOLF] $34.95    

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HARDY COUNTY, VA 1810 SUBSTITUTE CENSUS [Abstracts from the 1810 Personal Property Tax List] by John Vogt, 2011, 5 1/2"x8 1/2" format, viii, 11 pages, map.
        Hardy is one of eighteen Virginia counties for which the 1810 census is lost. In August, 1814 British troops occupied Washington, DC and public buildings were put to the torch. In the destruction that followed, numerous early records of the government were lost, including all of Virginia's 1790 and 1800 census reports, as well as eighteen county lists for the state's most recent [1810] federal census. Although two "fair copies" of each county's census had been left in the counties for public display, these were ephemeral lists and not preserved, and by 1814 they too had been mislaid, lost, or destroyed. Hence, the closest document available we have to reconstruct a partial image of the missing county lists is the personal property tax list.
       According to research notes by Minor T. Weisiger, Library of Virginia archivist: "Information recorded in Virginia personal property tax records changed gradually from 1782 to 1865. The early laws required the tax commissioner in each district to record in "a fair alphabetical list" the names of the person chargeable with the tax, the names of white male tithables over the age of twenty-one, the number of white male tithables between ages sixteen and twenty-one, the number of slaves both above and below age sixteen, various types of animals such as horses and cattle, carriage wheels, ordinary licenses, and even billiard tables. Free Negroes are listed by name and often denoted in the list as "free" or "FN."
       The present abstract of Hardy's 1810 personal property tax list is NOT a transcript of the entire document; rather, it is a summary of three items important in delineating the 1810 "substitute" census for this county, i.e., number of male tithables 16 and older, number of slaves twelve years and older, and the number of horses. The original form of the census was in alphabetic order by date and letter. The substitute list presented here is in absolute alphabetic order for easy reference.

In the current volume, the data is recorded thus:
Beck, Robert                  1      -      2
Bellama, John                1      -      1
Booker, Richard E.        1      -      -
Bouldin, Green              2      6      5
        Column one represents the tithable males (16 and over) in the household; column 2 is the number of slaves over 12; and the final column is the number of horses, mares or mules.
        For genealogical researchers in this 1810 period, personal property tax records may provide additional important information. Oftentimes, juniors and seniors are listed adjacent to one another and recorded on the same day. When a taxpayer is noted as "exempt", it can be a clue to someone holding a particular position in government or being elderly, infirm, or for some other reason no longer required to pay the tithable tax. Women, both black and white, appear occasionally as heads of households when they own property in their own right or as the widow of a property owner.
        Another valuable source for filling in information about an ancestor is the land tax record, and especially the one for 1815. In that year, the enumerators began to add the location of the property in relation to the county court house. Roger Ward has abstracted all of the 1815 land tax records, and they are available from this publisher at www.iberian.com.
        The 1810 substitute census list for Hardy County contains 811 households, 962 tithables, both white and free black, and 422 slaves over the age of twelve, and 3,226 horses.

Surname list

[HRDYPP] $4.50     (printed version)

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The above title is also available as a digital e-book in PDF format:

[EHRDYPP] $3.00     (electronic version version)

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Hardy Co. 1815 Directory of Landowners by Roger G. Ward. 2005. 22 pages, map, 5 1/2X8 1/2.
For a full description of the 1815 LAND DIRECTORY Records and a listing of available counties, see combined volume below

[Vd39] $7.00

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The above title is also available as a digital e-book in PDF format:

[EVd39] $4.50     (electronic version)

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1815 DIRECTORY OF VIRGINIA LANDOWNERS & GAZETTEER, vol. Northwest Region (Includes the counties of Berkeley, Brooke, Cabell, Hampshire, Hardy, Harrison, Jefferson, Kanawha, Mason, Monongalia, Ohio, Pendleton, Randolph, Tyler, and Wood ) abstracted by Roger G. Ward. 1997, vi, 232 pages, indices, maps.
In 1782 the General Assembly of Virginia enacted new tax laws which created within each county an enumeration of land and certain personal property. These early land tax laws required a tax commissioner in each district of a county to record a list of the names of persons owning land or town lots, the quantity of land owned and its value, and the amount of tax owed. By 1813, a brief geographic description (usually citing an adjacent stream, road, or other landmark) was required; in 1814, the distance and direction from the courthouse for each parcel was also added to the tax rolls.
The present work is an alphabetical listing of all 1815 landowners found in each county, as well as the accompanying description of the location of the said property. We have not included the number of acres, taxes assessed, or any transactions between landowners which may have been noted on the tax rolls; also, in many cases the geographic location was provided as "adjacent to John Smith", etc. and, while useful many times to a genealogist, was considered to be beyond the objectives of this project. The reader is encouraged to consider the information here-in as an "outline" of early landowners in Virginia rather than a "text" due to the year-to-year variation in information provided to the clerk (or recorded by the clerk), omissions, lack of "identifiers" to determine if "same name" was also "same person" within a district or across districts, marginal quality/clarity (in a few cases) of the microfilm copy, and, not least, errors on the part of either the original clerks or the current author while transcribing.
Some of the approaches to utilizing the 1815 landowner information include:

1. observe distinct clusters of the same surname within a county in order to clarify the common surnames such as "Smith", "Anderson", etc;
2. identify non-resident landowners and their county (or state) of residence (these people often being former residents of the current county);
3. determine neighbors with different surnames (often being relatives);
4. use the 1815 information as a "bridge" from the 18th and 19th century deed/will books to the 17th and 18th century land grants/patents in the county;
5. evaluate the 1810 to 1840 census information which generally grouped neighbors;
6. substitute this information for missing deed/will books in the "burned" counties; and, clarify/enhance vague deed/will information in the counties with more complete records.

FORMAT OF PRESENTATION: Each entry is listed as: Surname, name, personal identifiers (if any); location/place-name of land; miles/direction from the 1815 courthouse. If multiple owners are listed for a property, the listing is duplicated under each of the owner's surnames (i.e "Smith and Brown" is also listed as "Brown, --see Smith"); when multiple owners share a common surname, the property is only listed once. When a landowner had land at more than one location/place-name, the miles/direction listing for each parcel is in the same sequence as the location listing (i.e. James RV, Slate CK; 12N, 5SW.). In the few cases where a landowner had "many" parcels, the miles/direction notation is attached to the location listing (i.e. Sandy RV- 5NE, Willow CK-7S, etc.)

[Vdl6] $32.00    (paper version)

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The above title is also available as a digital e-book in PDF format:

[EVDL-6] $20.00     (electronic version)

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For records pertaining to HARDY COUNTY, VIRGINIA see:

• Hampshire, Pendleton or Grant Counties
• Guide to Virginia Militia Units in the War of 1812
• Chart on the Formation of Virginia Counties
• Atlas of County Boundary Changes in Virginia, 1634-1895
• Index to the 1810 Virginia Census

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