Dubovskoye

Dubovskoye lies in the open steppe of the Don Host lands, on a bend of the Sal river, a left-bank tributary of the Don, near the Ibrahim kurgan. This was Cossack range country of flat ground, seasonal water and routes that follow the valleys, where livestock, fields and mills could thrive on the surrounding steppe but spring floods and unstable banks imposed practical risks.

The settlement began on 21 March 1786, when the Cossack captain Alexander Dubovskov received a charter from the Don Host for land near the Sal. That same year he settled newly acquired peasants on the bend of the river and built a mill there. After his death another Cossack, Zhemchugov, settled his own peasants on the best of the land Dubovskov had been given and drove them to ruin, until the Don authorities ordered him and his neighbours to leave Dubovskov’s widow in peace. For a long time two settlements stood side by side, the Cossack farmstead of Dubovskov and the landowner’s village of Dubovsky, which by 1837 belonged to the stanitsa of Nizhne-Kurmoyarskaya.