William Buchanan Conway of Madison County, Virginia, and Julia Ellen Thomas, of Blacksburg, Virginia, were total strangers in the fall of 1869, when their correspondence began. Some mutual friends of theirs may have discerned a potential compatibility between the two and subsequently prompted the initiation of William and Julia's communication. Julia had lived all of her life in the then-remote mountain and college town of Blacksburg. William, who had grown up on plantation in Madison County in relative comfort and security before the war, had returned from the war in 1864 to discover much of his family's estate lost or sold. He and his brother Catlett ran their family's farm until 1866, when William left to study medicine in Culpeper Court House, Virginia. He continued his medical studies in Washington University in Baltimore, earning his M.D. degree in February 1869. Soon after this, William left home to pursue his medical career in Rockingham County, in the heart of the Shenandoah River Valley, and it was here that he first wrote to Julia.