The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Cardinal News has embarked on a project to tell the little-known stories of Virginia’s role in the march to independence. This project is supported, in part, by a grant from the Virginia American Revolution 250 Commission. Find all our stories from this project on the Cardinal 250 page. You can sign up for our monthly newsletter:
According to local legend, somewhere in the woods near an intersection in the Kingsville community of Prince Edward County are the graves of French soldiers and mercenaries who fought in the American Revolution, part of a legion sent south to bolster American forces fighting the British.
The story, repeated and embellished for decades, says that 70 of the soldiers sent to Kingsville died of smallpox after the Battle of Yorktown and were buried in the churchyard of the now-abandoned French’s Church.
The property in question is in a wooded area near a traffic roundabout not far from Hampden-Sydney College, at the intersection of Farmville Road (U.S. 15) and Kingsville Road (Virginia Route 133).
But highways aren’t the only paths that converge at the site — twisting rabbit trails of fact and folklore also intersect in Kingsville, confounding researchers for more than two centuries.
If the tales are true, then the final resting place of a contingent of heroic French allies from the Revolution is missing.
If they’re not, then folks in Kingsville have been searching for a “lost” cemetery that doesn’t exist, decorating a field of empty graves and driving past official highway markers filled with inaccuracies.
For decades, historians and archaeologists have searched for the truth. The answer, like most of history, is both complicated and compelling.
Listen to our podcast about the mystery of the French troops.
Who were the French troops?
Credit: Charles-Philippe Larivière, 1834
Understanding the legend’s origin requires a quick lesson in history and geography.
During the American Revolution, French King Louis XVI dispatched Jean-Baptiste de Rochambeau, 450 officers and 5,300 soldiers to help Gen. George Washington and the American forces fight the British. In August 1781, the Continental Army and its French allies marched from Rhode Island south to Yorktown in Virginia, where they met up with more French troops under the command of the Marquis de Lafayette.
They arrived in late September, a few weeks after French naval forces under Lafayette’s command had won the Battle of the Chesapeake and sealed off the escape route of British Gen. Charles Cornwallis’ army.
French and Colonial troops surrounded Yorktown, and Cornwallis surrendered on Oct. 19, 1781, after a three-week siege that ended the war.
Before departing Yorktown, Washington ordered French troops to remain behind for the winter in case the British returned.
Rochambeau sent about 600 troops to camp at Charlotte Courthouse, near the North Carolina Line, at the request of Gen. Nathaniel Greene, who was fighting the British in South Carolina.
According to local historian Thomas Morrissett, the majority of the troops sent to Charlotte Courthouse were from a mercenary group called Lauzun’s Legion. The company of mercenaries — roughly 60% German and 33% French — were a light cavalry/infantry division famous for being fierce fighters on the battlefield.
Morrissett determined this by researching Washington’s letters to Rochambeau in the Library of Congress.
The troops remained in Charlotte County until June 1782, when they left for Petersburg to meet up with the rest of the French troops. From there, they would march north to Boston, board ships and leave America in late December 1782 — all except the problematic legion, which was left behind in Boston and departed later.
“They were the misfits of Rochambeau’s army,” Morrissett said in a presentation to the Farmville-Prince Edward Historical Society in April 2024.
“It is said that Lauzun’s Legion made up only one-sixth of Rochambeau’s army, but gave him two-thirds of his problems,” Morrissett wrote in his research documents, citing Revolutionary War historian Robert A. Selig.
The roguish regiment had a desertion rate twice that of the rest of the French army. Rochambeau consistently kept them away from the rest of his troops, which is likely why he sent them to Charlotte Courthouse, Morrissett explained.
He could find no evidence in historical records from the U.S. or France of Lauzun’s Legion being in Kingsville, but they had horses and a reputation for misbehaving. Charlotte Courthouse is only about 19 miles from Kingsville — a relatively short ride.
Could members of the troublesome unit have become restless after the war and traveled to nearby Kingsville to frequent the town’s well-known taverns?
Morrissett said it’s entirely possible, but if so, it’s a strike against the theory that the men died of smallpox: “If they carried the smallpox virus, I believe that the civilians in Kingsville would have also contracted smallpox,” he wrote. “However, I found no reference to a smallpox outbreak in Prince Edward County during 1782.”
However, local history of the Kingsville area is filled with stories about the soldiers and their fate.
A highway marker at the Kingsville intersection — which has kept the story alive since it was installed in 1954 — says that, “According to tradition, a detachment of Rochambeau’s army wintered here after the battle of Yorktown, and seventy French soldiers were buried in the church yard.”
Another nearby highway marker at Kingsville, put up in 1930, says that “sick and wounded French soldiers were brought to this place from Yorktown; seventy of them are buried here.”
Articles in The Farmville Herald newspaper, dating back to 1903, present the story about the graves as fact, describing the annual decoration ceremonies at the churchyard and, in later years, the numerous searches for their actual location.
Yvonne Costello, a member of the Judith Randolph-Longwood Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution in Farmville, said she found numerous references to the DAR honoring the fallen soldiers throughout the years. She cited a May 1927 entry from a DAR regent’s handbook that said a group of adults and kids dressed up in French costumes for a procession to the site of the soldiers’ graves.
In April 1928, The Farmville Herald printed an address by Dr. J.D. Eggleston of Hampden-Sydney College, who repeated the story and noted that, “The graves of these soldiers can still be seen in the old field nearby, and from time to time French coins have been plowed up.”
The U.S. Army investigated at the DAR’s request, but “failed to reveal any record from the War Department as to the names of the allies interred at Kingsville,” according to a Richmond Times-Dispatch article from 1928.
A report from 1929 cited by Costello also mentions the DAR chapter decorating the “sacred shrine” of the French graves at a memorial service. The group even invited the French ambassador to attend, “and although he was unable to attend, he wrote a note of appreciation honoring his countrymen,” Costello said.
By 1932, however, a Herald article said the graves couldn’t be found.
The DAR hasn’t given up hope that the story — or some elements of it, at least — is true.
But could it be — as some historians in the Kingsville area believe, despite all these accounts — that the tale repeated and celebrated for more than 200 years never actually happened?
A foundation in fact
Credit: Jimmy Hurt
The first attempt at proving (or disproving) the legend was to see if the Episcopal house of worship known in historical records as French’s Church really existed in the Kingsville area.
It’s important to note that the name “French” had nothing to do with France.
Jimmy Hurt, president of the Farmville-Prince Edward Historical Society, said that the name was taken from Andrew French, who was neither a soldier nor from France. He was a Scottish merchant who ran a business called French’s Store in the 1700s.
The Scottish mercantile firm Buchanan & Company bought 400 acres in and around what is now Kingsville in 1755 and set up a store. According to local history, French’s Church was established on land near the store around 1761 and stood until 1784.
Dr. Eggleston from Hampden-Sydney wrote in 1928 that after the war, the church “fell into disuse and was sold and taken down. Only a few scattered bricks remain today to mark the spot, which is now grown up with trees and underbrush.”
The church was disassembled and moved to the site of Hampden-Sydney. Virginia gifted much of the former Buchanan & Company land to the college after the war.
Eggleston later spearheaded an effort to locate French’s Church.
The Farmville Herald ran an article in 1932 about Hampden-Sydney students who were sent to look for the foundations of the old church and the graves.
Their efforts “resulted in the discovery of brick work foundations thought to be those of the old church,” the article said. “The little chapel, known as French’s Church, measured only 23 feet by 43 feet, it was revealed by the ground plan.”
The expedition did not find any actual graves, but the DAR continued to hold memorial services at the site for years.
Charles Pearson, an archeologist with Hampden-Sydney College, began looking into the grave mystery around 2020, at the DAR’s request.
By researching old maps from a time when the college had the land surveyed, Pearson found the former location of the church — in a wooded area near Robin’s Spring, somewhere behind an Exxon station and near The Fishin’ Pig restaurant, in the area around the traffic circle intersection in Kingsville. The property is densely overgrown and mostly inaccessible today.
In the 1700s, the church would have been across the road from the site of Kingsville’s two main taverns.
Pearson said he found no evidence the church was ever used as a hospital for the smallpox-infected soldiers, as one of the articles by Eggleston stated in the 1920s.
Ray Gaskins, professor emeritus of mathematics and computer science at Hampden-Sydney, is an amateur historian who is considered an expert on the area’s cemeteries. He has looked into the French soldiers’ graves stories extensively.
In a letter to The Farmville Herald in October, Gaskins said that while the church foundation was found, “even the use of a metal detector had produced not so much as a French coin or uniform button.”
The likelihood of finding anything other than bones is unlikely, he said, because “during the American Revolution, soldiers in the field were buried without benefit of uniforms or coffins.”
The site is dotted with holes dug by those seeking the graves, which “had been left for [the property owner] to refill and she was not happy about that,” he noted.
Gaskins said some people had suggested using ground-penetrating radar to locate the graves, “but before that could be done, the land was so overgrown that it would have to be bush-hogged. Besides, GPR is ineffective on very old graves where there is nothing left to detect.”
The Mettauer Mystery
In his book, “On This Hill: A Narrative History of Hampden-Sydney College 1774-1994,” historian John Lunster Brinkley wrote that “Francis Joseph Mettauer, a surgeon with Rochambeau’s forces, brought a company of those men to Kingsville from Yorktown [and] practically all died of smallpox.”
Mettauer figures prominently in the Kingsville legend, but his role with the French army is a source of debate and disagreement.
A doctor of French descent named Francois Josef Mettauer did indeed settle in the Kingsville area and became the first resident practicing physician in Prince Edward County.
His son, John Peter Mettauer, became a famous physician, sometimes called the “father of plastic surgery.” He was known as a skilled but eccentric surgeon who carried his custom-made medical instruments in his stovepipe hat — which he was buried in.
Pearson contacted historian Robert A. Selig — considered one of the foremost authorities on French military activity in Virginia — who could find no record that Mettauer was ever attached to the French army.
“He was not at Yorktown,” Pearson said.
Pearson’s contact at The Yorktown Museum sent him an original document from the war — a comprehensive list of French troops at Yorktown, which included medical staff — and Mettauer’s name does not appear.
According to Gaskins in his letter to The Farmville Herald, the French government also was contacted to see if they had a record of Mettauer attending wounded soldiers at Kingsville.
French military historian Lt. Xavier Tabbagh answered the query: “We have no record of a Dr. Mettauer having been attached to the French Army during the American Revolution.”
When Pearson brought this fact up during the 2024 presentation to the historical society in Farmville, there was some disagreement.
A DAR member at the meeting said a friend in France checked an archive there, which listed Mettauer as a surgeon attached to either Rochambeau or Lafayette’s troops. It’s possible that Mettauer was a personal surgeon who traveled with one of the French officers, and was not attached to the army.
Whatever his role, there’s no evidence he brought the French troops to Kingsville.
No evidence of epidemic
So, what about the soldiers’ alleged cause of death, a smallpox outbreak?
Smallpox is not mentioned in the earliest accounts of the story — nor is the fact the soldiers died at all.
Hurt said the area now called a “graveyard” was originally referred to as “the camping ground of Rochambeau’s troops” as far back as 1903, when the first article mentioning the soldiers in Kingsville was published in The Farmville Herald.
The article said troops “camped on the glebe lands,” referring to property owned by the church.
Pearson said that the glebe lands “were located several miles away from the church itself, meaning that this possible first mention of the soldiers does not even place them at the church itself.”
The article also “makes no mention of diseases or anybody dying. It just says they were quartered there,” he added.
Something changed in the years that followed, but the historians are unsure what caused the shift.
A 1912 biographical dictionary is “the first mention I could find of troops buried in the churchyard,” Pearson said. “All of these articles talk about local traditions and local stories,” but none of them cite any authoritative primary sources.
Hurt said Eggleston from Hampden-Sydney gave members of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities Landmark Committee a tour of Kingsville in 1928. After that, Eggleston also began referring to the site as a graveyard instead of a campground, and advocated for placing a historical monument at the site.
“If these men were sick at Yorktown, why would they march them all the way to Kingsville,” a distance of 130 miles, Hurt asked. “Or, did they get sick after they got here?”
For Morrissett, the answer is simple: they were never sick at all.
He researched all available letters between Washington and Rochambeau, from after the battle of Yorktown in October 1781 through June 1782, and all letters from Gen. Choisy, commander of Lauzun’s Legion in Charlotte Courthouse.
“I found no reference to any troops being sent to Kingsville or 70 French soldiers dying of smallpox,” he said, nor was there any mention of it in any of the French journals, books or documents he reviewed.
An earlier smallpox epidemic had ended by 1782, Morrissett found.
None of the historians have been able to determine where the specific number of soldiers in the story originated. Morrissett said he could never find in the French documents any reference to 70 French troops missing or dead.
He has read two versions of the smallpox story, but said neither holds up under closer scrutiny.
One story stated that the troops already had smallpox and were sent from Yorktown to the Kingsville area for medical care.
“In the spring of 1782, the Williamsburg hospital had so few patients that Washington ordered it to be closed,” Morrissett said. “Why would they send 70 men, infected with smallpox, all the way to the Kingsville area when the Williamsburg hospital was almost empty?”
The other story — that the troops acquired smallpox while stationed in Kingsville — also doesn’t add up, according to Morrissett.
“If 70 soldiers contracted and died from smallpox in Kingsville, this would have been around a 12% reduction in force for Lauzun’s Legion. I would think that this would have been a significant concern and thus documented,” he said.
Fact or fable?
“After researching and reading all these detailed articles, I was convinced the story of French’s Church and the missing graves had to be true,” Pearson said at his presentation in 2024. “After all, all these people for the past 100-plus years or longer could not be wrong. Right?”
However, the deeper historians and archaeologists dug into the Kingsville story, the less they found to support it.
On Christmas Day in 2022, a car accident at the Kingsville traffic circle took out the historical marker across from Town & Country Furniture.
It has never been replaced, and Gaskins argues that it shouldn’t be, “because the story it told of 70 French soldiers being buried nearby is simply not true.”
In his Oct. 6 letter to The Farmville Herald, Gaskins presents his case against the legend, following nearly two decades of research.
In 2007, Selig — the Revolutionary War historian — approached the Farmville Historical Society about including Kingsville on a proposed national historic trail of French and American troop movements. Selig noted that there were numerous secondary sources that spoke of the 70 French soldiers buried at Kingsville, but he wondered if Gaskins had any primary source to substantiate this claim.
“Since I was the local ‘cemetery expert,’ the question was handed to me to investigate,” Gaskins wrote. “I looked everywhere and found no primary source.”
When he related his findings to Selig, Gaskins asked him how a story like this gets started.
According to Gaskins, Selig said, “I don’t know, but I have run across at least one of these kinds of local stories in every state I have worked in.”
A clue to the story’s apocryphal nature is that all the accounts begin with similar statements:
“According to tradition…”
“The story goes…”
“It is believed that…”
“If you look at the newspaper articles, they quote family stories,” Pearson said. “Sometimes those stories are right on the mark; sometimes they’re a little off center.”
Likewise, Morrissett said he was not able to find a single article that provided facts to support the story.
“I am of the opinion that it is folklore,” he concluded. “A story that has been passed down through generations and at some point was accepted as truth. It would be nice to know how this story came to be, but I doubt we will ever know.”