Henry Dickenson (29 November 1750–5 July 1825), member of the Convention of 1788, was born probably in Louisa County and was the son of Henry Dickenson and Agnes Jennings Dickenson. He likely attended a private school in Louisa before his family moved to Prince Edward County in the mid-1760s. About 1768 he married Mary Powell, with whom he had five sons and three daughters who lived to adulthood. By September 1773 Dickenson and two of his brothers had moved to the Clinch River valley, and on 21 May 1774 he obtained a survey for 140 acres of land in Fincastle County. Boundary changes placed the property in Washington County from 1776 to 1786 and in Russell County thereafter. During the next several decades Dickenson augmented his holdings through land grants, and in 1825 he paid taxes on 1,390 acres. In 1820 the census taker enumerated twenty-four enslaved workers in his household.
Dickenson and others who moved to southwestern Virginia during the eighteenth century lived under the constant threat of clashes with Indigenous tribes. In 1774 the royal governor, John Murray, fourth earl of Dunmore, organized a militia campaign against the Shawnee and other tribes in western Virginia. Dickenson served with a Fincastle County company under the command of William Russell. The unit, which belonged to Colonel Andrew Lewis's southern division of Dunmore's militia, marched toward the Ohio River and fought a combined force of Delaware, Mingo, Shawnee, Wyandot, and others at Point Pleasant near the mouth of the Kanawha River on 10 October 1774. Later in the 1770s Dickenson helped build a fort near his Clinch River cabin, in the vicinity of Castlewood, and he participated in skirmishes with Indians there. The Washington County Court recommended to the governor on 26 February 1777 that Dickenson be named an ensign in the militia, and on 20 March 1782 the court recommended his appointment as a lieutenant. During the Revolutionary War he fought at the Battle of Kings Mountain in South Carolina on 7 October 1780. Virginia's western counties remained dangerous in the last decades of the eighteenth century, and in 1785 Indians captured Dickenson's sister, Fanny Dickenson Scott, after killing her children and husband. She escaped and after an arduous journey eventually found her way home. In 1793 the governor appointed Dickenson to muster a Russell County militia company for the defense of the frontier.
At the initial meeting of the Russell County Court on 9 May 1786, a commission from the governor named Dickenson a justice of the peace. That day he was also appointed clerk of the court. He held the position until his death, but deputies often performed the routine duties of the office. In April 1787 the court accepted Dickenson's offer to donate sixty-two acres of his property to be used as a county seat, though the deed of transfer was not recorded until 19 October 1790. On the plot, located about five miles south of his former cabin and across the road from his new home, Dickenson constructed a log courthouse, and his brother built a jail. The court first met at the site, known as Dickensonville, that September, and Dickenson received licenses to operate a store and a tavern there. He also served as caretaker of the public buildings. A new stone courthouse replaced the original structure in 1799, and the county seat moved to Lebanon in 1818.
On 18 March 1788 Dickenson was one of two men elected to represent Russell County in the convention called to consider ratification of the proposed constitution of the United States. He arrived in Richmond on 2 June and was present throughout the proceedings, although he did not speak. On 25 June, Dickenson and nearly every other member from western Virginia voted to require that the Constitution be amended before ratification. After that measure failed, he voted against ratification, and two days later he joined other antifederalists in supporting an amendment to reduce the new government's power of taxation. On 18 August 1789 Dickenson and other Russell County justices of the peace took the oath of allegiance prescribed by the United States Congress.
By the mid-1820s Dickenson was one of the wealthiest men in the county. He raised cattle, hogs, and sheep on his farm and owned stock in the second Bank of the United States. Henry Dickenson died on 5 July 1825, probably at his home in Dickensonville, where he was buried.
Sources Consulted:
Biographies in Alice E. Meade, "F. E. L. Fugate Home" (typescript dated 8 Apr. 1937), in Works Progress Administration, Virginia Historical Inventory, Library of Virginia (LVA), and in "Genesis of the Dickenson Family of Southwest Virginia" (typescript, 1963), 1–3, LVA; Mary Jane Knisely, "Dickensons of Southwest Virginia: Antecedents Prior to 1800," Southwest Virginia Historical Society Publication No. 9 (1975), 7–19 (now-illegible birth date on gravestone transcribed on 8); variant birth date of 28 Oct. 1747 in National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, DAR Patriot Index (1966), 192; Dunmore's War, Fincastle Payrolls and Public Service Claims, 1775, Colonial Papers, State Records Collection, Record Group 1, LVA; Dickenson's Kings Mountain affidavit in Lyman C. Draper Papers, MSS, 3DD225–229, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wis.; William P. Palmer et al., eds., Calendar of Virginia State Papers and Other Manuscripts, 1652–1869 (1875–1893), 4:460, 6:442, 705; John P. Kaminski et al., eds., The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution: Ratification of the Constitution by the States, vols. 8–10: Virginia (1988–1993), 9:563, 10:1539, 1541, 1557, 1565; D. C. Pratt, Russell County: Virginia's Bluegrass Empire (1968), 12, 14–15, 149; Russell Co. Will Book, 4A:213–216; death recorded in Russell Co. Order Book, 8:57.