John Thomas Dunlop (25 January 1842–25 March 1907), entrepreneur, was born and grew up on the Frederick County, Maryland, farm of his parents, Henry Dunlop and Catharine Louis Ann Thomas Dunlop. He reportedly declined an offer from his uncle Francis Thomas, a congressman and former governor of Maryland, to secure him an appointment to the United States Military Academy or to the Naval Academy and on 22 October 1862 enlisted with other Maryland Confederates as a private in what became Company G of the 7th Virginia Cavalry. Dunlop served in northwestern Virginia and in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War and was wounded several times, once severely in the right shoulder in April 1863. While recuperating with cousins in Rockbridge County, Virginia, he became engaged to Mary Jane Glasgow. They married on 26 January 1865 and are not known to have had any children.
Dunlop remained in Rockbridge County after the war, raised wheat, and dealt in cattle. He cultivated a portion of his wife's family's land and later purchased additional property nearby in the valley of the Maury River close to where the new town of Buena Vista was founded late in the 1880s. The town was one of the centers of a brief but spectacular promotional boom that raised and then dashed hopes there and in the Shenandoah Valley early in the 1890s. Promoters published brochures and illustrations depicting Buena Vista as a thriving industrial community with residential and commercial property available at bargain prices, even though many of the buildings shown in the illustrations had not been erected. Residents mined iron ore and converted it to pig iron within the town limits, and various other factories and mills dotted the landscape. More than a dozen improvement, land, and investment companies also sprang up. Joining the rush, Dunlop formed the Forest Land Company in 1890 and reorganized it in March 1891 as the North-West Buena Vista Building and Improvement Company, with himself as president. He helped found two banks at the beginning of the decade, the First National Bank of Buena Vista, of which he became president in 1893, and the First National Bank of Lexington, of which he became president in 1891.
Dunlop's wife died on 6 August 1890, and he married Alice W. McCorkle in Lexington on 25 November 1891. They had no children. Early that month, following several years of involvement in local Democratic Party politics, Dunlop easily won election to one of the two Rockbridge County seats in the House of Delegates. He served on the Committees on Counties, Cities, and Towns; on Labor and the Poor; and on Schools and Colleges. Dunlop introduced a bill to grant a city charter to Buena Vista, but by the time the bill passed in February 1892 and the voters elected the first city officials in May of that year, the speculative boom had collapsed, and many of the major investors had lost most of their money. Dunlop remained solvent but in 1893 deeded part of his land in trust to his wife to protect it from creditors. He did not run for reelection to the House of Delegates that year.
John Thomas Dunlop was still serving as president of the First National Bank of Lexington when he died at his home near Buena Vista on 25 March 1907. He was buried in Stonewall Jackson Memorial Cemetery (later Oak Grove Cemetery), in Lexington.
Sources Consulted:
Biographies in Hardesty's Historical and Geographical Encyclopedia, … Special Virginia Edition (1884), 414 (with variant birth date of 25 Feb. 1842), South-West Virginia and the Valley: Historical and Biographical. Illustrated (1892), 174, and Lyon Gardiner Tyler, ed., Men of Mark in Virginia (1906–1909), 2:105–106 (portrait facing 105); birth and death dates on gravestone; Marriage Register, Rockbridge Co. (1865, 1891), Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; Compiled Service Records of Confederate Soldiers (1861–1865), War Department Collection of Confederate Records, Record Group 109, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; Rockbridge Co. Deed Book, 79:83–84; Buena Vista Advocate, 7 Nov. 1890, 27 July 1894; Lexington Gazette, 15 Oct. 1891, 29 Oct. 1891, 5 Nov. 1891, 12 Nov. 1891, 3 Dec. 1891; Hugh A. White, "Personal Recollections of the Rockbridge Land Boom," Lexington Rockbridge County News, 21 Apr. 1938, 28 Apr. 1938 ; Stuart Seely Sprague, "Investing in Appalachia: The Virginia Valley Boom of 1889–1893," Virginia Cavalcade 24 (1975): 134–143; Francis W. Lynn, ed., Buena Vista: The Bud Not Yet Blossomed (1992), 16; obituaries and memorial resolutions in Lexington Gazette, 27 Mar. 1907, and Lexington Rockbridge County News, 28 Mar. 1907.