Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 1, 1991 TAG: 9102010482
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
That dubious distinction is said to belong to a little-known Confederate general from Southwest Virginia - who turned the Little Kanawha River in West Virginia into a "river of fire" in 1863.
He was William E. Jones - known to his men as "Grumble" Jones because of his sour disposition.
And like the present Iraqi dictator, Jones spilled the oil mostly out of meanness.
Confederate records, wartime diaries and biographies by Civil War veterans tell the story:
Jones was a West Pointer who served in the U.S. Army fighting Indians in the West, then retired to Washington County to take up a life as a gentleman farmer - at least until the Civil War broke out.
Jones eventually became the answer to a trivia question: When Stonewall Jackson was called East to help defend Richmond, who replaced him as head of Confederate troops in the Shenandoah Valley?
One of the rebels' aims had long been to interrupt the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, the slim reed of rail that connected Washington with the Midwest.
In the spring of 1863, another Confederate general operating in the valley, John Imboden of Staunton, presented a daring plan for the Civil War equivalent of a commando raid into West Virginia to destroy a key bridge the B&O passed over.
But generals and government bureaucracy being then pretty much what they are now, Imboden's plan for a small squad of cavalry riders to make quick, secret dash into the West Virginia mountains was transmogrified into a slow, lumbering advance by an entire army - Jones' army.
Needless to say, the element of surprise was lost, and Jones found the bridge well-defended. But instead of turning back, Jones pressed on, wreaking havoc throughout West Virginia until he nearly reached the Ohio River.
There, not far from Parkersburg, stood Burning Springs - a boomtown that had sprung up in the "oil rush" of the late 1850s and early 1860s.
Gen. Robert E. Lee had given Jones strict instructions to respect private property, but Jones concluded that this oil was being used by the Union Army to lubricate machinery. That changed everything.
More than 150,000 barrels of oil were stacked up, some already loaded onto boats on a small stream that fed into the Little Kanawha River. Soldiers gleefully took axes to the barrels, and the crude gushed out into the water.
Then they set it on fire.
The barrels that hadn't been axed burst like artillery shells, observers reported. Confederates hooted as the fire spread down the oily water, chasing boats that had the misfortune to be plying the river at the wrong time.
In his official report to the Confederate government, Jones was almost poetic as he described the scene: "Before night, high columns of ebony smoke marked the meandering of the stream as far as the eye could reach. By dark, the oil from the tanks on the burning creek had reached the river, and the whole stream became a sheet of fire. A burning river, carrying destruction to our merciless enemy, was a scene of magnificence that might well carry joy to every patriotic heart."
With that, Grumble Jones marched back to the Shenandoah Valley a happy man.
Historians cite this as the first time that oil was a military target.
Despite the spectacular pyrotechnics, however, the destruction of Burning Springs, and the polluting of the Little Kanawha, had no military significance.
As for Jones, he was shot dead a year later at the Battle of Piedmont in Augusta County.
by CNB