About Jeff Smith:
Overcoming Disability to
Achieve a Childhood Dream:Being a Confederate cavalryman was a childhood dream for Jeff. As a little boy growing up in Pennsylvania not far from the Gettyburg battlefield during the Civil War Centennial years, Jeff often visited the battlefield with his grandfather, an avid amateur historian.
General ReynoldsDespite the fact that his great-great uncle was Maj. Gen. John Fulton Reynolds, leader of the legendary Iron Brigade, the first union general to fall at Gettysburg, Jeff always felt a greater affinity with the Confederates, particularly the Confederate cavalry. Mosby was his childhood hero, having read Virgil Carrington Jones' Ranger Mosby and being an avid fan of the early 1960's TV show "The Gray Ghost."
Jeff maintained his interest in the War, the cavalry and Mosby's Rangers throughout his adult life, majoring in history at college and getting involved in reenacting, initially in the 7th Virginia cavalry, dismounted.Then, in 1990, his life fell apart. Jeff was seriously injured in an industrial accident, falling 14 feet onto a concrete floor when a novice forklift driver ran into the scaffolding Jeff was dismantling. His back was broken and he suffered traumatic brain injury (TBI).
At first, doctors feared he might not live. Then, they feared he may never walk. Instead, Jeff decided that he would RIDE.
This dream kept him going through his initial recovery stages. Once he had overcome the worst of his injuries, he began riding lessons, and bought his first horse, Oreo.
In 1995 friends who noticed the similarity between Jeff's slight, wiry build and that of Mosby, invited him to portray the famed partisan ranger at a reenactment in Connecticut. He hasn't looked back.
Impressed with the role that horseback riding had played in his own recovery, Jeff began working as a residential counsellor to Traumatic Brain Injury patients, using riding as a means of therapy. At this stage, he also began working on putting together a mounted search and rescue team, with recovering TBI patients forming part of the team.
In late 1999, Jeff moved to West Virginia, explore the potential of working mounted search and rescue teams in the Blue Ridge. In 2000, he moved to Northern Virginia, so that he could carry out his charitable and historic activities in "Mosby's Confederacy". Most recently, he has been involved in the effort to save the Robert E Lee Boyhood home in Alexandria.
If you would like to book Jeff for a charity or living history event, please e-mail us.
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