Mountain View Plantation, affectionately known as The Octagon House, was the antebellum home of the Abijah Thomas Family. The history of this storied house and the Thomas family entails much more than an eight sided or octagon plantation house. According to family history, ancestors of the Abijah Thomas family were present during the initial European migration to the New World from England. A direct descendant, Stephen Hopkins, is the only known person to have migrated to the new Jamestown settlement in the Virginia Colony, returned to England, then returned to the New World on the Mayflower.
The family continued to be involved in the growth of the Virginia colony. John Thomas, born in 1733 to Amos Thomas and Ruth White Thomas in Massachusetts, migrated to the southwestern area of Virginia in 1771. At that time, this area was still considered by many to be the wilderness. He met and married a local lady by the name of Mary Robinette who bore six children to this union.
One son, Thomas Thomas, became a man of property and influence in Washington County, a surveyor, serving as a Justice of Washington County, and sheriff. He was also the overseer of roads in the area that eventually became Smyth County (established in 1832). Marrying Freelove Cole, they established, what would become the “homeplace” in the Southfork of the Holston River valley in the eastern section of the county. One son, Abijah, born in 1814, became involved in the operations of his family’s plantation. He eventually inherited the title to the original 400-acre homeplace along with numerous other land holdings numbering in the tens of thousands of acres. He delved into the business world, acting as the New York Douglas family representative, caring for their landed interest of which would eventually become part of the Jefferson National Forrest.
However, agrarian plantation life was not his only interest. Abijah established the Holston Woolen Mills and expanded multiple industries throughout the area including a pig iron furnace which reduced iron-ore to pig iron that was in great demand at the time. He also established a tannery near the furnace that produced fine leather. He later purchased a cotton mill in Alexandria, Virginia. All four industries helped in the growth of not only Smyth County but in the state of Virginia and the South as a region. The southern geographic United States was primarily an agrarian culture during the antebellum period. Industry was not established in many areas, therefore for one man to have multiple industries was practically unheard of. He would later be called by the author Goodrich Wilson to be “the foremost industrialist of Smyth County”.
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