Colonel John Stuart (1749–1823), a Revolutionary War commander and pioneering western Virginia settler, surveyed and settled the Greenbrier Valley and is known locally as the "Father of Greenbrier County". At the age of twenty, Stuart was a member of the 1769 survey by citizens of Augusta County, Virginia, which explored the wilderness of the Greenbrier Valley to the west in preparation for European settlement. The following year he built the first mill in present-day Greenbrier County, at Frankford. In 1774, he led a company of Greenbrier troops in the Battle of Point Pleasant at the confluence of the Kanawha and Ohio Rivers. He was among Lewisburg's first trustees and in 1780 he became Greenbrier County's first clerk, leaving many historic records behind.