Qualla: Gen. Albert Gallatin Jenkins House

Gen. Albert Gallatin Jenkins House: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Youngamerican at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. On a long bottomland bench above the Ohio River, fifty miles upriver from the Kentucky line, a brick plantation house has stood since about 1835. The estate was called Green Bottom for the rich alluvial soil along this stretch of the river, all 4,395 acres of it. The house's most famous resident was Albert Gallatin Jenkins, a two-term U.S. congressman from Virginia who in 1861 walked out of the Capitol, rode home to Green Bottom, and joined the Confederate army. By 1862 he had raised a regiment of cavalry. By 1863 he was a brigadier general. By 1864 he was dead, mortally wounded at the Battle of Cloyd's Mountain. The house at Green Bottom outlived him by more than a century and a half, and it is now open as a museum.

Image: Youngamerican at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Gen. Albert Gallatin Jenkins House: A Brick House on the Bottoms

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Youngamerican at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Jenkins family began assembling Green Bottom in the early 1800s, and the surviving house was built around 1835 by Albert's father, William Jenkins. It is a two-story rectangular brick dwelling in the late Federal style, set on a sandstone foundation. The interior is a center-...

Image: Youngamerican at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Gen. Albert Gallatin Jenkins House: The Congressman Who Became a Cavalryman

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Youngamerican at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. Albert Gallatin Jenkins was born at Green Bottom in 1830, about five years before his father finished the house. He attended Jefferson College in Pennsylvania and Harvard Law School, then returned home to practice law in Charleston, Virginia. In 1856 he was elected to the U.S. Ho...

Image: Youngamerican at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Gen. Albert Gallatin Jenkins House: The People Who Built the House

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Youngamerican at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. The full story of Green Bottom is also the story of the people who were enslaved here. The 1860 federal slave schedules recorded the enslaved population on the Jenkins property. Their labor cleared the fields, raised the crops, tended the livestock, served in the kitchen and the ...

Image: Youngamerican at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Gen. Albert Gallatin Jenkins House: Cloyd's Mountain and After

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Youngamerican at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. On May 9, 1864, at the Battle of Cloyd's Mountain in southwestern Virginia, Union forces under General George Crook attacked Jenkins's cavalry and infantry across a steep hillside. Jenkins was struck in the arm and captured. The wound became infected; surgeons amputated, but he d...

Image: Youngamerican at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0