The Stroud Family Massacre and Bulltown Massacre are only two of a lengthy list of atrocities that took place along the border in the years leading up to what came to be known as "Lord Dunmore's War" in 1774. As hostilities increased between the Colonists and the Shawnee and Mingo Tribes, the Virginia House of Burgesses declared War.
As hostilities increased Adam Stroud moved back to the South Branch of the Potomac River, this time settling near Romney in Hampshire County. Here he joined the Virginia Militia and served as a soldier in Lord Dunmore's War. In the work "Virginia's Colonial Soldiers", by Lloyd Bockstruck, Adam Stroud is listed in "The Names of the Soldiers on the Pay Rolls at Romney and Winchester" under "Captain John Harniss's Roll of Rangers." The Battle of Point Pleasant was the only major engagement of Lord Dunmore's War. Adam Stroud was not present at the battle because the Hampshire County Militia had been sent to Fort Pitt on the Ohio River beforehand. The short war ended soon after the battle with the signing of the "Treaty of Camp Charlotte".
After Lord Dunmores War in 1774, most of the men who had served in the Virginia Militia went on to serve the Revolutionary cause when hostilities broke out with the British in 1775. In the work "Historic Register of Virginians in the Revolution, 1775-1783" by John Gwathmey, Adam Stroud is listed as a soldier from Romney. Adam Stroud is also found in the work "Archives of the Revolutionary Soldiers in the Virginia Militia, Richmond'" by H.J. Eckenrode, the "DAR Patriot Index" by the Daughters of the American Revolution and is listed as a "Soldier in the Virginia Troops out of Hampshire County" in the "Patriot Research System" of the Sons of the American Revolution.
Adam Stroud served throughout the American Revolution in the Hampshire County Militia. Local militia units on the western Virginia frontier were often more occupied with defending settlements from the Indians than they were with fighting the British. In his essay "Disaffection in the Rear; German Torries in the West Virginia Mountains" Klaus Wust summarizes the attitude of many German settlers of western Virginia;
"News trickled very slowly into the narrow vales and hollows along Lost River, Moorefield River, and South Branch of the Potomac where numerous German-speaking neighbor- hoods existed among settlers of English and Scotch-Irish descent. All of these settlements had suffered great destruction and loss of life from Indian incursions ever since 1755. Most families had fled eastwards several times in the span of one generation. Throughout the Revolutionary War these communities remained threatened by Indian war parties which explains the reluctance of men to march off into far-away battlefields. The combination of remoteness, lack of information and the Indian danger at their doors, caused many of the German settlers in the western mountains to show a lukewarm response at best to the many demands the authorities made on men and means. They had never failed to take up arms in the defense of their neighborhoods. Neither had they actually ever felt oppressed by British colonial authority because for decades they had been very much left alone to fend for themselves."
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