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Jesse Virgil Dobbins was a thirty-one-year-old farmer in Yadkin County in 1861. He owned a 225-acre farm, where he lived with his wife, Sarah, aged twenty-one, and his one-year-old son, Daniel. Dobbins raised all his family needed to eat, including wheat, corn, oats, and potatoes, and had three cows for milk and butter, as well as two pigs. Dobbins also produced molasses and honey on his farm. He grew hay as food for the animals and flax to make linen for clothing. He did not raise the cash crops cotton and tobacco. His farm size and property ranked Dobbins as a typical farmer in his county. A member of the Society of Friends (Quakers), he opposed slavery and probably was a Whig before the war. Dobbins, a unionist, strongly opposed secession, which put him at odds with many North Carolina citizens, including members of his own family and community.
Jesse Virgil Dobbins did not join the Confederate army when the war broke out in 1861. Nor did he enlist after the draft went into effect in August 1862. Dobbins's Quaker religious beliefs and political feelings did not allow him to support the Confederate war effort. Some people considered Jesse a ringleader of unionist activities in Yadkin County. Fearing arrest by Confederate authorities, Jesse Dobbins, his brother William, and several others decided to leave and join the Union army. They met at the Bond Schoolhouse in February 1863 and engaged in a shoot-out with the Home Guard that left four men dead. Jesse and William fled to Tennessee, where they enlisted in the Federal army. William died of illness in 1864, but Jesse survived and served the remainder of the war in a blue uniform.
Jesse Virgil Dobbins received an honorable discharge from the United States Army and returned home in the summer of 1865. He found that local citizens had not forgotten his part in the 1863 Bond Schoolhouse shoot-out. Dobbins faced charges for the murders of the Home Guard captain James West and of John Williams. He escaped arrest by his own cousin, Sheriff Vet Speer, and rode sixty miles to Salisbury, where he found Federal soldiers. They returned to Yadkin County with Dobbins, confronted local court officials, and had the murder charges dropped. Jesse Dobbins went on to help found the county's Republican Party. By 1880 he had become a prosperous farmer and miller and lived with his wife and eight children on a 595-acre farm. Dobbins died of a heart attack at his mill on May 10, 1883, at the age of fifty-three.
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