Colonial Character Narratives

Thank you for participating in our immersive experience in Colonial Virginia.  To learn more about the real life person that inspired the narrative you followed today, find the person's name and story below.

John Broddy (Edmund)

Born around 1750, John Broddy was enslaved by the Campbell family of Southwest Virginia. When Colonel William Campbell led frontier militia to victory at the Battle of King’s Mountain in 1780, Broddy accompanied the campaign, one of several enslaved men who supported Patriot forces. He served as Campbell’s personal attendant and likely helped care for wounded soldiers and horses throughout the expedition.

Colonel Campbell died the following year, and Broddy returned to the Campbell plantation, where he remained enslaved. Although Campbell reportedly intended to free him at the end of the war, that promise was not fulfilled until 1793, when Campbell’s son-in-law, Francis Preston, formally granted Broddy his freedom.

Broddy spent the remainder of his long life in Southwest Virginia, eventually settling near Saltville. Local accounts state he died in 1859 at the remarkable age of 109, although his exact age cannot be verified.

John Wyatt (Abner Martin)

John Wyatt, a cooper (barrel maker) from Botetourt County, served in the Continental Army during the American Revolution. Captured by the British in South Carolina, he later escaped captivity, reportedly by bribing a guard with rum and using an assumed identity to pass through British lines.

According to Wyatt’s later pension testimony, Continental officers, chiefly General Andrew Lewis, recognized the value of trust he had gained among British troops and employed him as a scout and spy. Posing as a British captain, he gathered intelligence that helped expose plans to raid the lead mines at Chiswell in modern-day Wythe County, an essential source of lead for Patriot ammunition in Southwest Virginia. The conspiracy was revealed and the conspirators seized.

Wyatt continued serving until the end of the war, including during the Yorktown Campaign that secured American independence. Afterward, he returned to Botetourt County and resumed his trade as a cooper before moving to Indiana and dying in 1833.

Anna Maria Lane (Dorothea Spott)

Anna Maria Lane is one of Virginia’s best-documented women veterans of the American Revolution. Married to soldier John Lane probably in New Hampshire before the war, she accompanied him into military service under an assumed male name, with only her husband in on her secret.

Lane fought alongside Patriot forces during several campaigns and was severely wounded at the Battle of Germantown in 1777, leaving her permanently disabled. Following the war, the Lanes settled in Virginia. In recognition of her sacrifices, the Commonwealth awarded Anna Maria Lane an annual pension, one of the earliest military pensions granted to an American woman, at the price of $100 a year, exceeding her husbands, which was just $40 a year.

Sullivan Incursion Survivors (Manêasãn)

In 1779, General George Washington ordered General John Sullivan to lead a campaign against the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, whose six nations (Seneca, Cayuga, Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, and Tuscarora) were divided in their support during the American Revolution. Washington instructed Sullivan to destroy villages, crops, and food supplies to prevent further attacks on American settlements.

Nearly 5,000 Continental soldiers swept through present-day New York, burning more than forty Haudenosaunee towns and forcing thousands to flee, many seeking refuge at British-held Fort Niagara. There, famine, disease, and the harsh winter cold claimed countless lives.

Among the villages destroyed was Coreorgonel, home to the Tutelo people, whose ancestors had once lived in Virginia’s Roanoke Valley before migrating north decades earlier. Historians today regard the expedition as one of the Revolution’s most devastating campaigns against Indigenous peoples, with consequences stretching far into the future.

Virginia Sal (Eliza Randolph)

Little is known with certainty about the woman remembered as Virginia Sal. According to long-standing tradition, she accompanied Major Patrick Ferguson’s Loyalist force as a camp follower and domestic partner, washing clothes and cooking meals to support the soldiers under Ferguson’s command.

Legend holds that she remained beside Ferguson during the Battle of King’s Mountain on October 7, 1780, where both were killed. Some stories claim she died defending him, while others suggest she was mistaken for Ferguson in the confusion of battle. Historians have been unable to verify these accounts, and some question whether Virginia Sal and another camp follower known as Virginia Paul were actually the same woman.

Thomas Posey (Adam Whitlock)

Thomas Posey (1750 - 1818), originally from northern Virginia, settled in Fincastle briefly in the 1770s as a young saddle maker, supplying equipment to travelers and frontier settlers in what would one day become Southwest Virginia. Like many frontier craftsmen, he also served in the local militia, first fighting during Dunmore’s War before joining the Continental Army in the Revolution.

Posey served with distinction throughout the war, enduring the winter at Valley Forge and fighting at Monmouth before commanding troops during the Yorktown Campaign that secured American independence. His military service launched a long public career that eventually took him west, where he served as Lieutenant Governor of Kentucky and later as the final Governor of the Indiana Territory before Indiana achieved statehood in 1816.

A long-standing local legend claimed Posey was the illegitimate son of George Washington because the two families were neighbors and remained friends throughout their lives. Historians, however, have found no credible evidence supporting the story.