The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Cardinal News has embarked on a three-year project to tell the little-known stories of Virginia’s role in the march to independence. This project is supported, in part, by a grant from the Virginia American Revolution 250 Commission. Find all our stories from this project on the Cardinal 250 page.
Quick, where is Andrew Lewis Memorial Highway? If you live and work in Southwest Virginia, you have probably put hundreds or even thousands of miles on it. (Answer below!)
Fort Lewis Mountain, whose wild and rugged slopes contain the Havens Wildlife Management Area, is named for him.
Arranged in a circle beneath the equestrian statue of George Washington in Richmond, completed in 1869, are six other Founding Fathers from Virginia: Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, John Marshall, George Mason, Thomas Nelson Jr. (a signer and brigadier general), and Andrew Lewis. Some fought with words; others, with weapons, including the rifle-wielding Lewis. They proudly defend the father of his country, under sun, rain, and snow, while an ever-changing array of schoolchildren, office workers and politicians passes by.
Sometimes the students and politicians interact. Morgan Griffith, now a U.S. congressman from Salem, is an Andrew Lewis buff. In Richmond as a member of the House of Delegates, he once overheard a teacher misidentify Andrew as “Meriwether” Lewis.
Griffith straightened out the embarrassed teacher and the students, “but it’s part of the problem that people don’t know who he was,” said Griffith in an interview in a coffee shop in Salem. “Even my wife sitting over there probably couldn’t give you much on it, other than ‘Oh my God, it’s something that my husband talks about.'”
Lewis Avenue, Andrew Lewis Middle School, Fort Lewis Elementary, state historic markers, a statue at the civic center, a monument at the cemetery — Salem natives grow up with Andrew Lewis all around. And yet, said Salem Museum Executive Director Garrett Channell, most know only that he was “someone important.”
Listen to our podcast with Garrett Channell, Andrew Lewis re-enactor.
The most diligent researcher of Andrew Lewis was Patricia Givens Johnson (1932-1996) whose 1980 biography, “General Andrew Lewis of Roanoke and Greenbrier,” is the only book dedicated to the Revolutionary general. It is a record of deeds, rather than thoughts; action, rather than words.
Most accounts state that Andrew Lewis was born in Donegal, now part of the Republic of Ireland, in 1720, the third son of John and Margaret Lewis. John Lewis, of French Protestant background, was a tenant of the aristocratic Campbell family. When the Campbells raised his rent, John was unable to pay. The Campbells came with guns to evict him. Firing into the house, they killed John’s brother. John then killed one of the Campbells, reportedly with a single blow from a shillelagh — an Irish fighting stick with a heavy knob. Young Andrew knew of, and maybe even saw, the violence, learning that deadly force is sometimes necessary to defend family — and that land equals power.
Having killed a nobleman, John fled, first to Portugal, then to America. Margaret and the children joined him, and by 1732 the Lewises were settled in Orange (later Augusta) County, Virginia, near what became Staunton, among a handful of pioneer families. Andrew was about 12.
His frontier education emphasized hands-on work with the musket, ax, hoe, saw, hammer, shovel and surveyor’s chain. He grew strong and tall and had the sharp eyesight needed for aiming the long rifle of the frontiersman.
The environment shaped the man, but genetics played a part as well. Andrew’s brother William preferred books to guns. William went to medical school in Philadelphia, then returned to Staunton to practice. It seems that Andrew Lewis was born for the outdoor life.
In contrast to thickly settled Europe, North America, when the Europeans came, was comparatively empty, a New World of salmon, eagles, bears, elk, wolves, bison and uncounted millions of chestnut trees. The whites, with their guns, surveying equipment, and legal procedures, chose to ignore or invalidate the claims of those scattered bands of people who had lived and hunted in the eastern woodlands since time immemorial. The project of the 18th century, from the Euro-Americans’ point of view, was land acquisition, and the Lewises were part of it.
On his surveying treks, Andrew sometimes stopped by the Scotch-Irish Givens family who lived near Augusta Stone Church, north of Staunton on present U.S. 11. Among the nine children was a daughter named Elizabeth. To Elizabeth Givens, the six-foot-four outdoorsman must have looked like a promising husband, while for his part, “Andrew did not look to the east for a bride. This speaks well for the Scotch-Irish girl whose best dress was probably made from flax woven on the family loom,” Johnson wrote. Andrew may have called her Eliza.
The newlyweds lived in a stone house, no longer standing, about two miles outside of Staunton, probably near his father’s house on Lewis Creek. In the coming decades — indeed, until Andrew’s death — Elizabeth saw little of him. It’s easy to picture her watching with mixed feelings as he rides away on another surveying, military or political trip. She raised their seven children mostly without him, probably with the help of the older children and extended family, as well as the forced help of enslaved African-Virginians.
In 1754, Lewis received a captain’s commission in the Virginia Regiment, the first unit commanded by Maj. George Washington. Lewis “did not realize as he joined the other recruits in Alexandria that he was embarking on a path of continual warfare for the next nine years, nor that he would be serving under a man who someday would be known as one of the world’s greatest soldiers,” Johnson wrote.
Neither man’s military career began auspiciously. In one of the opening salvos of the French and Indian War — the struggle between the British and French, and each side’s Indian allies, for control of North America — the Virginians under Washington were defeated by the French at Fort Necessity in Pennsylvania. Lewis was wounded twice, a friend remarking, “He behaved with bravery under the eye of George Washington.”
In 1755, Washington appointed Lewis as a major in the reorganized Virginia Regiment. When in camp, officers were supposed to wear blue uniforms cuffed and faced with scarlet and trimmed with silver, a scarlet vest with silver lace, blue breeches and a silver-laced hat. Whether Lewis felt comfortable in European military finery is not recorded, but he certainly valued rank and aspired to move up. His everyday wear was probably the fringed linen hunting shirt of the Scotch-Irish frontiersman.
‘Stick to war like men’
Two years later, as the French and Indian War continued, Lewis was given an independent command, leading Virginia forces and Cherokee allies against the French-allied Shawnee on the Ohio River.
The arduous back-country trail crossed and recrossed rain-swollen Sandy Creek, a tributary of the Ohio. With his hungry men deserting in scores, Lewis decided to turn around before even reaching the Shawnee town. Lewis became the target of critics, as he was throughout his career, but an investigation by the House of Burgesses absolved him.
During the Sandy Creek debacle, the Cherokee chief Outacite remained loyal to Lewis. Outacite later wrote to another officer, “You, Major Lewis and myself have always thought alike. Take my advice, stick to war like men, and let the children in Virginia grow up to be men before they are killed by their enemies.”
Maj. Lewis around this time was described as a “tall, heavy formed man, full, florid with a fine countenance, dark brown eyes, austere and reserved” and “seldom known to smile.” Despite the forbidding exterior, Lewis must have had some interpersonal skills, as he managed Washington’s network of Cherokee spies in the back country.
In September 1758, Lewis took part in the British-American attack on Fort Duquesne at present-day Pittsburgh. He reportedly killed a Native American in hand-to-hand fighting before being captured by the French. In laying blame for the defeat, Maj. James Grant, a British officer, charged Lewis with failing to carry out an attack. Enraged, Lewis challenged him to a duel. Grant declined.
Reports reaching George Washington erroneously listed Lewis as killed in action. Washington reported to his lady love, Sally Fairfax, “Among the slain was our dear Major Lewis.” To Lt. Gov. Francis Fauquier, Washington wrote, “Major Lewis … is a great loss to the Regiment and is universally lamented.” It’s not known whether Washington wrote to Elizabeth, then eight months pregnant with her fourth child. As soon as he could, Lewis wrote to Washington, with the irregular spelling that reflected his frontier upbringing: “I have the hapiness of Aquanting you that I am in perfect helth…”
Released by the French, Lewis was put in charge of defending Southwest Virginia. His headquarters west of Salem came to be known as Fort Lewis, and the long, high ridge, across present I-81, as Fort Lewis Mountain.
He was next assigned to Fort Chiswell, in present day Wythe County, where he surveyed the land surrounding the lead mines that later provided invaluable munitions to the Patriot armies. Riding the rough trail that later became U.S. 11, he must have worried about his wife and children back in Augusta, still within reach of hostile Native Americans.
In 1761, he received a brevet (temporary) promotion to colonel, which he felt was overdue. “He always seemed at the bottom of the promotion list though he did the dirtiest, most man-killing work for the [Virginia] Regiment,” Johnson wrote. “He had as much experience as Washington himself yet received scant praise from him.”
This is not to say Washington was unfriendly to Lewis. They worked together as land speculators, both for themselves, and to secure land for veterans of the French and Indian War. There was something else holding Lewis back.
Usually, “Scots and Irish officers were the last promoted in the regular army,” Johnson wrote. In a surviving letter, another officer called Lewis “Paddy,” a nickname for an Irishman. Whether they called him Paddy to his face is not known. If they did, perhaps it was partly in jest. But when promotion boards met in London there was no joking around. The prejudice was real.
‘Villaneous bloody minded rascals’
In 1765, Lewis was county lieutenant in Augusta. One day a group of friendly Cherokee passed through on their way to fight the Indians on the Ohio. Lewis gave them papers, he said, “in order to let everybody know they were our brothers the Cherokees and to use them well and allow them to pass.”
The next morning, a mob of Augusta men attacked and murdered five of the Cherokee. The enraged Lewis found the bodies of the dead, including Nocknowe and The Pipe, whom he had known well. He put two suspects in the Staunton jail and then wrote the Cherokee chiefs, saying, “I shall not be at peace in my mind before I have all the others taken that they suffer death for the bloody crime.” He pleaded with the chiefs to “quiet your young men and keep them from taking satisfaction or kindling a war that must make the innocent suffer for the guilty.” He wrote to Lt. Gov. Fauquier that “a party of villaneous bloody minded rascals attacked [the Indians] in the most treacherous manner, killed their chief and four more on the spot and wounded two more.”
The outrage was the work of 20 to 30 men who called themselves the Augusta Boys. They later claimed they had mistaken the Cherokee for hostile Shawnee. One or two of the “Boys” put up a public notice accusing Lewis of disloyalty to the crown and offering a thousand-pound reward for his capture. The government back east was on Lewis’s side, but it feared a civil war, and the murderers received little punishment.
Richfield
In 1766, Lewis paid £942 for 600-plus acres stretching along the Roanoke River from what is now downtown Salem to the General Electric plant. “Andrew had become enamoured with the green bottomland surrounded by blue peaks and watered by the usually peaceful but sometimes rampaging Roanoke river,” Johnson wrote. By 1771, Elizabeth and the children were in the home they called Richfield. Andrew had ten years left to live.
The house, big for the times, was near the site of the Yokohama Rubber Plant. A porch caught the river breeze and another faced north. The parlor’s four windows were hung, after 1775, with damask curtains abandoned by Lord and Lady Dunmore in their flight from the Governor’s Palace.
Lewis farmed, as did all Virginians of the era, with much of the work being done by family members and enslaved persons. His will recorded 20 slaves, 19 horses, more than 50 cattle, 40 hogs and 30 sheep.
The children ranged in age from infancy to young adulthood. Among their diversions were carriage trips along present U.S. 11 for “frolics,” perhaps accompanied by an enslaved fiddler, at the home of their friends, the Madisons, in Shawsville in Montgomery County. Three Lewis children married into the Madison family.
After Lewis’s death, part of the property was sold to James Simpson, who platted the town of Salem. 
‘The fate of war’
In fall 1771, Lewis ran for the House of Burgesses for Botetourt County (which then included present Salem). Although one relative described him as “haughty,” he evidently had enough of the common touch to beat out William Preston and several other candidates. In Williamsburg, he and Virginia’s last royal governor, Lord Dunmore, started on congenial terms as fellow land speculators.
By 1774, serious trouble was brewing between the Colonists and the royal authorities, but they patched up their differences in the face of a perceived threat from the Shawnee and their allies in the Ohio River country. Dunmore wrote London that “the Indians are mediating some important stroke, and we are taking such measures as are in our power for our defense.”
“At the time Dunmore wrote this on April 2,” Johnson wrote, “there were few hostilities on the Ohio and after the war ended Dunmore’s superior in London said he was at a loss to see how the war ever got started.” On the other hand, Glenn F. Williams in “Dunmore’s War” (2017) concluded that “the Virginia governor led his colony’s forces in defense of what they viewed as legally acquired territory and demanded no further land concessions from those they defeated.”
Lewis’s reaction to the outbreak of hostilities isn’t known, but as a military man he was accustomed to following orders.
Dunmore’s plan was to trap the Shawnee and their capable commander, Cornstalk, in a pincer movement, with one wing led by himself, and the other by Lewis. Lewis’s group included his youngest brother, the popular Col. Charles Lewis.
On Oct 6, Lewis reached Point Pleasant in modern West Virginia, where the Kanawha joins the Ohio. As the men went about building a camp, they wondered, like all soldiers on the eve of battle, about their enemy. A trader described the Shawnee as “tall, manly, well shaped men, of a copper color with black hair, quick piercing eyes, and good features” wearing “a piece of cloth drawn through their legs … like a short apron … all their hair is pulled from their eyebrows and eyelashes … faces painted in different parts with vermillion,” a bright red-orange. They had “rings of silver in their nose with bobs which hang over their upper lip.” Silver discs hung from their ears. “The hair is all cut off except a long lock at the top of the head.”
These were the warriors whom the Virginians would face on Monday, Oct. 10, 1774. Before sunrise, two men who had gone out hunting stumbled on Cornstalk’s Shawnees about two miles away. One hunter was killed but the other ran back to alert Lewis. The commander had his men form in columns. At sunrise, almost one thousand Shawnees, Delawares, Mingoes and Ottawas attacked. Charles Lewis was shot and as he was dying, Andrew told him, “I expected something fatal would befall you.”
“It is the fate of war,” Charles replied.
Amid hot fighting in the wooded angle between the Kanawha and the Ohio, Cornstalk was heard shouting to his men, “Be strong, be brave.” The whites, accustomed to Indian hit-and-run tactics, had nothing but admiration for the enemy’s courage in a pitched battle, as they charged “into the very muzzels of our guns,” Maj. William Ingles recalled. By 1 p.m., the firing slackened and the Indians could be seen throwing their dead into the Ohio. At sunset Cornstalk’s survivors slipped away. Lewis held the field.
Few slept at Camp Point Pleasant that night amid the cries of agony. The wounded Dr. William Fleming pushed his own protruding lung back into his chest. Lewis sent a message to Dunmore begging for aid.
Lewis’s pride in the victory was mixed with grief. He had lost one in five killed or wounded, including his beloved brother. The aftermath of the battle, like all battles throughout history, victorious or not, was raw and bitter in the homes of the widows, like Mrs. Charles Lewis, who, in convulsions of grief, told relatives she wanted to die.
Lewis’s monument at East Hill Cemetery in Salem calls Point Pleasant “the opening act in the drama whereof the closing scene was played at Yorktown.” Was it really “the first battle of the American Revolution,” as some sources claim?
“The victory at Point Pleasant was crucial in securing the Ohio River frontier for Virginia,” said Salem historian John Long. “It pretty much ended the Shawnee threat to the frontier. Virginians didn’t have to fight to protect the frontier and fight the British in Tidewater at the same time. That’s the thinking behind calling the Battle of Point Pleasant the first battle of the American Revolution.” 
The last of Lord Dunmore
After Point Pleasant, events moved quickly. In March 1775, as Botetourt representative to the Second Virginia Convention in Richmond, Lewis was in St. John’s Church when Patrick Henry called for liberty or death. The convention chose Lewis to serve on the defense committee along with Washington, Jefferson, Henry, Edmund Pendleton and William Christian. Lewis was angry when Henry, who had scant military experience but political clout, was appointed commander of Virginia forces, instead of a more qualified man such as himself.
The snub was rectified when the Continental Congress, on March 1, 1776, appointed the victor of Point Pleasant a brigadier general and put him in charge of Virginia troops.
Dunmore had fled the Governor’s Palace the previous year. By May, he and his fleet were ensconced at Gwynn’s Island in present-day Mathews County. With warships guarding the sea approaches, Royal Marines fortified the island’s landward (western) side. Dunmore’s disease-ravaged Ethiopian Regiment, comprised of escaped slaves, couldn’t lend much help; “there was not a ship in the fleet that did not throw one, two, or three or more dead overboard every night,” Dunmore reported. The 7th Virginia Regiment, under Lewis, took up positions on the mainland across from the island.
It was July 9, 1776 — word from Philadelphia of the events of July 4 had yet to arrive — when Patriot 18-pounders opened fire on Dunmore’s ships. Lewis himself fired the first shot at Dunmore’s flagship. Wood splinters wounded Dunmore in the leg and smashed his fine china. Other British ships were also hit. Lewis then turned his batteries onto the camp.
Dunmore gathered his survivors — those who could walk — and fled. When Lewis and his men landed the next day, they found an invisible ally — micro-organisms — had done more damage than their cannonballs. The horrified Patriots, in an account printed in the Virginia Gazette, discovered “a number of dead bodies in a state of putrefaction, strewed all the way from their battery to Cherry Point about two miles in length, without a shovelful of earth upon them; others gasping for life; and some had crawled to the water’s edge, who could only make known their distress by beckoning to us. Many were burnt alive in brush huts which in their confusion had got on fire. “
The victor must have hoped for recognition, but when Congress announced promotions in 1777 his name was not there. Instead, the rank of major general was awarded to Adam Stephen, a hard drinker who had been under Lewis at Gwynn’s Island and whose behavior Lewis regarded as borderline dishonorable.
It was too much. The bitterness between the lines is more than evident in Lewis’s resignation letter to Congress, sent the day the promotions were announced: “It would be very disagreeable to me to be considered … a dead weight. I beg leave that I may be suffered to withdraw from an office to which I must be thought unequal … nothing can lessen a man more or take more from his usefulness than setting persons over him whom he had a right to command.”
A relative later wrote, “Andrew was a man of commanding person and disposition, brave and adventurous, a warm friend to those who gained his favor & haughty toward others. Hence although a capital officer in many respects he was generally unpopular and this last circumstance gave rise to many slanderous remarks about him after the campaign of 1774. He was formed for greatness but had no regard for popular applause. He had towering notions of military rank and hence he soon declined his commission of General … because General Stephen was made to outrank him.”
One can imagine Lewis’s gratification upon hearing that Maj. Gen. Stephen, drunk at the 1777 Battle of Germantown, was relieved of command by Washington and court-martialed. Lewis wrote sarcastically, “I hope Congress are happy in the proofs they have given of their infallibility in giving promotion [regardless of] seniority, tho’ some think that suspension and a general court martial are against it.” As for Washington, he wrote a letter of sympathy to his old friend but apparently didn’t pull strings to get him promoted.
Lewis could have sulked at Richfield, but instead continued to serve. He helped supervise the security of the western frontier, gathered provisions for the Patriot troops, and served in Richmond on Gov. Jefferson’s executive council. 
Fading from memory
In September 1781, traveling home from Richmond in ill health, he stopped in Montvale, in Bedford County. Dr. William Fleming arrived to find Lewis “speechless, and in the agonies of death.” The once vigorous frontiersman died of a fever on Sept. 25, 1781, aged 60. Had he lived a month longer he would have heard happy news from Yorktown.
Had he lived a decade longer he might be better remembered today. “Because Lewis doesn’t survive the war, he doesn’t become a congressman or a senator or a governor after the war like so many of the other Revolutionary War leaders,” John Long said. “He kind of fades from memory as the years go on.”
He was better remembered in the 19th century, as evidenced by his placement among Washington’s inner circle at the equestrian statue in Richmond. The 19th-century leaders who put him there “were the children of the men who fought the war, or in some cases the grandchildren,” Griffith said.
There are no life portraits or busts of Andrew Lewis. The fierce, eagle-like visage that appears on the statue in Richmond is a conjecture by sculptor Randolph Rogers. The face on the statue in front of the Salem Civic Center, by Anne Bell, is copied from Rogers.
Morgan Griffith believes Lewis should be remembered in spite of his participation in slavery. “There’s no one in history except for Jesus Christ who is without sin,” Griffith said. “We should recognize greatness wherever it is achieved. We should recognize the fight for freedom, whether it be the civil rights movement or the American Revolution, and you shouldn’t just say, ‘get rid of all that history.'”
From Montvale, Lewis was carried to Richfield and buried under a large rock south of the present-day civic center. In 1897, his remains were moved to East Hill Cemetery and placed under an obelisk with a mountain view that remains beautiful today.
Elizabeth’s burial spot is not known. She may have moved to Kentucky in 1790. She remains separated from her husband in death, as she was in life. Richfield, a pleasant house that Andrew Lewis was seldom home to enjoy, burned sometime after 1811.
“A man should be what he can do,” said a fictional soldier, Robert E. Lee Prewitt, in “From Here To Eternity.” Andrew Lewis did what Nature equipped him to do — hunt, survey, fight, build, farm, ride, command. A man capable of using force judiciously, he helped to carve a civilization from a wilderness and impose the will of an incipient nation upon a mother country unwilling to let go. The Revolution needed men of action as well as men of words; Lewises as well as Jeffersons.
But even men of action have inner lives. Given the scant remaining sources — his papers were destroyed in the 1790s — it’s hard to get a feel for what he was like among family and friends, or in the mess tent among brother officers.
While Lewis the cast-bronze patriot stands forever strong at the state capital, the private man escapes the biographer, like a strong buck leaping ahead of the hunter through the leafy ravines of Fort Lewis Mountain on a brisk autumn day.
In 2001, the General Assembly approved a bill sponsored by then-Del. Morgan Griffith designating Interstate 81 in Rockbridge, Botetourt and Roanoke counties and Salem as Andrew Lewis Memorial Highway. 
Sources: “Andrew Lewis,” American National Biography; Andrew Lewis, mountvernon.org; Battle of Gwynn’s Island, virginiaplaces.org; “General Andrew Lewis of Roanoke and Greenbrier” by Patricia Givens Johnson
Don’t miss another story from our 250 project.
Sign up for our monthly Cardinal 250 newsletter or any of our other free newsletters below:
