Spanish in Saltville? Maybe they beat the English to Virginia

“Saltville is my favorite place on Earth,” said Jim Glanville to a congregation of Tazewell County Historical Society members listening to him from the pews of historic Pisgah United Methodist Church in Tazewell County.

Recently retired as director of chemistry at Virginia Tech, Glanville’s professional and private lives are entwined with the history of the town that calls itself a “time capsule set in scenic beauty.” Saltville is a geologic and historical wonder located in a jewel of a valley, surrounded by rugged mountains that separate it from Tazewell to the north and Chilhowie to the south.

Glanville’s chemistry profession brought him his first contact with the town. In 1895, Mathieson Alkali Works, a chemical company, opened a plant in Saltville. The company mined the brine found in great deposits under the town. Later, the name became Olin-Mathieson and the company turned to making other products such as rocket fuel.

In the 1970s, the plant was forced to close for environmental reasons related to work that Glanville was engaged in. The chemistry professor says that when he did a Google search on Saltville, he stumbled into a story so fascinating that his research did a hard right taking him away from industrial chemistry and into a deconstruction of Virginia history.

The title of the paper he wrote after extensive research tells the tale: “Conquistadors at Saltville in 1567?” His conclusion answers this question with a definitive “Yes” in the 2004 edition of “The Smithfield Review,” a scholarly magazine that publishes “Studies in the history of the region west of the Blue Ridge.”

If the Spanish were in southwestern Virginia in 1567, that was 40 years before the Jamestown Settlement, he says. 1607 is the default date for the beginning of Virginia history.

Through meticulous reading and sometimes his own translation of all primary documents written by Spanish soldiers, explorers and New World administrators; and the reading of all works of professional researchers and historians on the subject, Glanville came to two conclusions.

The first recorded account of Europeans stepping on Virginia soil was during Hernando de Soto’s expedition into southeastern U.S. in search of gold. According to primary sources, in the summer of 1540, the Spanish force camped just south of Lee County, Virginia. The account states that Juan de Villalobos and Francisco de Silvera walked 70 miles north to scout out the richness of the land. That would place them in Virginia. While the documentation is indisputable, historians cannot say with 100 percent certainty that the men came into the state, though map study shows that it’s highly likely that they did.

If true, the irony is twofold: Lee County’s motto is “Where Virginia Begins.” That’s a play on the county’s geographical location -- it’s the westernmost tip of Virginia, more than 400 miles from the coast where Captain John Smith claimed the region for England’s Queen Elizabeth. Glanville’s research says that the motto could be true: Virginia history began in the state’s interior when the Spanish came there and wrote about it many years before the Jamestown landing.

Jamestown conjures up Glanville’s second finding: Conquistadors fought a battle in Saltville in 1567 and Saltville’s Luisa Menendez, not Pocahontas, was the first Native-American woman to be identified in written records. He supports this with flawless archaeological and documentary evidence.

Again, there is no chain mail, no buttons or coins to show that the Spanish were in the Saltville region. But the scientist who’s trained to work in a black and white world of facts has had no problem adapting to the gray one of the historian.

“History is not like chemistry,” he said. “A chemist can say that water is H2O, and you know it is not H3O or H 2 and ½ O.” History is not that easily defined.

The London, England native has applied the scientific research method to history. He rejects anything that can’t be verified -- like rural legends, he says.

People have told him of a family in Smyth County who has a Spanish helmet that’s been in their possession for years. “Show it to me,” he said. No one produced the helmet.

Another time he met a man who told him about a Tazewell County gravesite where a Spanish soldier was buried in his armor. “Show it to me,” he said. The man couldn’t do it. Glanville demands concrete evidence to plug into his hypotheses.

He turned to Morganton, N.C., south of Saltville, to authenticate the Saltville connection. He found it in the writings of the Spanish who, in 1565, built a fort there, in a corner of a Native American village, where the soldiers lived for a few years.

While the writings had been known for many years, it wasn’t until the late 1990s that archaeologists discovered the fort and uncovered the Spanish artifacts. This supported the veracity of the Spanish documents telling of an attack on a village, a four days’ journey to the north, a place where salt was produced. Saltville is the piece that fits into this puzzle.

Glanville gleaned another gem from the records. He found Menendez, whom he calls the “first lady of Saltville.” During an inquiry into the richness of resources in the interior lands, she tells of being a young girl in a place where salt was made. For some reason, after the attack, she left that place and came to St. Augustine where she married a Spanish man.

This story and subsequent research raises “a tantalizing possibility,” Glanville writes, “that the history of European development in Virginia begins not in the east of the state, but in the west.”