James Dabney Estes was born on 31 January 1836 as the first of seven children to Benjamin Harrison Estes and his wife Eliza Miller Dix Estes. Throughout the Antebellum era, James D. Estes grew up on his father’s tobacco plantation near Cascade Creek and helped raise his younger brothers and sisters. James acquired an interest in studying medicine, and the 1860 census shows that James finished medical school and moved to the community of Ringgold to practice as a physician. Back in Cascade, his parents still lived with six of their children on their plantation. Census records also reveal there were four buildings to serve as quarters for the twenty-five enslaved people at that time.
In 1861, James enlisted in the Confederate Army and served with Company I of the 18th Virginia Infantry, which was known as the “Spring Garden Blues.” He became an assistant surgeon and learned to administer anesthetics and perform surgery for wounded soldiers on the battlefield. Three of his brothers also fought in the war, two of which served in the 38th Virginia with the “Cascade Rifles.”
Dr. Estes married Nannie J. Steele from North Carolina in 1878. Together, they never had biological children, but they later adopted his nephew and two nieces. The 1880 census shows J. D. Estes as the first entry in the “Village of Cascade.” However, he was not the only country doctor in the village at that time. Nearby, Dr. Sidney Armistead Powell (1829-1898) kept the community healthy as well. A chunk of the community worked in tobacco factories and the majority of others worked as tobacco farmers or laborers. The village had two grocers, a general merchant, a teacher, and a handful of skilled tradesmen. Many of the families had been settled for a couple of generations and married locally, which led to a tight-knit community.
To quote from his lengthy obituary, “There were few families in the Cascade section who had not ‘had’ Dr. Estes as the family doctor” and he helped with many of the local births. “Some of the older men in Danville…say that Dr. Estes’ name was a household word from Danville to Stuart and from Madison to Altavista. He was perhaps the very last of the old school of country doctors in this vicinity–men who had little rest and who braved all sorts of weather to carry out errands of mercy. For years he followed the general practice of the country doctor who had a stout horse which not only carried his master but also the well-filled saddlebags in which the instruments of the day and medicaments were carried. It was customary for doctors not only to operate at the home of the patient, but to compound the medicines they prescribed. Hence he was a doctor and drug store combined and his life was a hard one.” A different article from 1908 recounted a time when Dr. Estes extracted a minie ball bullet from the leg of fellow veteran William Davis Giles three decades after his injury.
Dr. Estes died on 30 January 1928. His obituary further stated, “News was received here today of the death last night at 8 o’clock of Dr. James Dabney Estes, one of the best-known practitioners in this section of Virginia. Had he lived but four hours longer, he would have been 92 years of age…His funeral will take place at noon tomorrow at the old family home at Cascade and burial will be made in the nearby graveyard.” The obituary continued, “Until two years ago Dr. Estes was active for a man of his years and he stopped practicing medicine not more than 10 years ago…it is current among doctors of today that Dr. [John] James and Dr. Estes were the first surgeons in the South to adopt ether and chloroform, which was viewed when first discovered by many doctors as something to be avoided.”
In the mid-1990s, historian Danny Ricketts purchased the original business ledger that belonged to Dr. Estes. He recounted in a social media post from 2013 that the book “came from the upstairs of an old house in Cascade.” He also added, “There were lots of books and papers, but I think this is the only thing that I could get.” In 2024, the ledger was given to me by Danny’s son, Bobby Ricketts. It contains about fifty years of records between 1872 and 1921. The cover has a lot of obvious wear, but the pages remain intact and legible.
