WV-FOOTSTEPS-D Digest                           Volume 00 : Issue 154


Today's Topics:
  #1 BIO: MILLARD FILLMORE HAMILTON, M.   [Valerie & Tommy Crook <vfcrook@ear]
  #2 BIO: GUSTAVUS JOSEPHUS SHAFFER, Pr   [Valerie & Tommy Crook <vfcrook@ear]
  #3 BIO: BENJAMIN T. NEAL, JR. Wood Co   [Valerie & Tommy Crook <vfcrook@ear]




______________________________X-Message: #1
Date: Sun, 09 Jul 2000 11:30:00 -0400
From: Valerie & Tommy Crook <vfcrook@earthlink.net>
To: WV-FOOTSTEPS-L@rootsweb.com
Message-Id: <4.3.1.0.20000709102916.00c30de0@mail.earthlink.net>
Subject: BIO: MILLARD FILLMORE HAMILTON, M. D., Marion Co. WV
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The History of West Virginia, Old and New
Published 1923, The American Historical Society, Inc.,
Chicago and New York, Volume III,
pg. 440-441


MILLARD FILLMORE HAMILTON, M. D., of Mannington,
graduated in medicine and quialified himself for the practice
of that profession forty years ago. Except for brief in-
tervals his professional work has all been in Mannington.
Doctor Hamilton is more than a capable physician and
surgeon, is a citizen known for his progressiveness and
leadership in many movements, is a former mayor of Man-
nington and has also to his credit a record of service in
the Legislature.


He was born near Mannington February 22, 1860, son
of Ulysses and Malissa (Yost) Hamilton. He is a de-
scendant of Henry Hamilton, who came to America in
Colonial times from the north of Ireland, where his ancestry,
a branch of the great Hamilton family of Scotland, had
been established in earlier generations. Henry Hamilton
first located at Winchester, Virginia, where he married
Elizabeth Tryand. Subsequently he removed to the vicinity
of Morgantown, West Virginia, and in 1818 he left Monon-
galia County and settled on Plum Run in Marion County.


His son, Boaz Fleming, was born in Morgantown in 1798,
and was ten years of age when the family settled in
Marion County, where he became a widely known and in-
fluential citizen. He was a stanch democrat. He was de-
feated as a candidate for county clerk of courts in 1852,
but in 1858 was elected to that office and served three
years. October 26, 1828, he married Maria Parish.


Their son, James Ulysses Hamilton, was born at Fair-
mont January 12, 1839. In 1843 the family established
their home at Salt Lick in Marion County, where James U.
Hamilton grew up and lived his active life as a prosperous
farmer and influential citizen. He died on his farm there
in 1915. He married Malissa Yost, daughter of Nicholas
Yost, of Fairview and member of the old and prominent
family of that name in Marion County. Malissa Hamilton
died January 1, 1916, in her seventy-ninth year.


Millard Fillmore Hamilton spent his early life on his
father's farm, attended common schools, the Fairmont
Normal School, and began the study of medicine under the
preceptorship of his uncle, Dr. P. D. Yost, of St. Louis,
Missouri. Doctor Hamilton in 1883 graduated from the
American Eclectic Medical College of St. Louis. He began
practice in Mercer County, Missouri, but in 1883 returned
to West Virginia, and has been a leading physician and
surgeon at Mannington since that date, except for a period
of six months during 1885-86 when he was on the Pacific
Coast in practice at Fort Ross, California. Doctor Hamil-
ton has held the post of district surgeon for the Baltimore
& Ohio Railway for thirty-eight years, and for the past
twenty-five years had been a member of the United States
Board of Examining Surgeons for Pensions, and president
of the board during the last five years. He is a member
of the Marion County, West Virginia and American Medical
Associations, has served as vice president of the West Vir-
ginia Eclectic Medical Association, and is a member of
the Baltimore & Ohio Railway Association of Surgeons.


He was one of the organizers and incorporators of the
Opera House Company, and helped organize and was presi-
dent during its existence of the Mannington Development
Company. He was one of the promoters of the Mannington
Glass Company, and has always taken a deep civic pride in
all matters pertaining to the welfare of Mannington and
vicinity. For sixteen years he was president of the Bank of
Mannington. He is owner of a number of houses in Man-
nington, several farms, and on one of these at Salt Lick
he built a beautiful home, where he and his family spend
the summer months. In 1921 at their bungalow in the
country were entertained the members and their wives of
the Marion County Medical Society.  This place is one
of the notable horticultural projects of the county, Doctor
Hamilton having developed an orchard of between 1,800 and
2,000 fruit trees.


Doctor Hamilton has been a member of the City Council
of Mannington, and in the spring of 1918 was elected mayor.
He was in the office during the World war. In that time
the streets were filled with thousands of drafted men and
their relatives and friends, Mannington being the drafting
center for Marion County outside of Fairmont. Under such
conditions the city was so well policed that there was not
a single accident, tragic or otherwise. In 1918 Doctor
Hamilton was elected a member of the West Virginia Legis-
lature. In the session of 1921 he introduced a joint resolu-
tion, adopted, requesting the Federal Government to select
Berkeley Springs in Morgan County as the site for one
of the five soldier sanitariums which the Government con-
templated building in different parts of the country. This
subject is still pending, only one of the sites having been
selected to date. Doctor Hamilton was appointed a member
of the Board of Trustees of Berkeley Springs by Governor
Morgan.


In August, 1888, Doctor Hamilton married Miss Bessie
L. Basnett, daughter of Festus D. Basnett, of Mannington.
Doctor and Mrs. Hamilton have two sons. Dale H., born
August 25, 1894, is a graduate of agriculture and horti-
culture from West Virginia University and now has charge
of his father's fruit farm. During the World war he was
in the Government's Spruce Division on the Pacific Coast,
where he had charge of eight hundred men in getting out
spruce timber for airplane building. Dale H. Hamilton
married Carla Lee Yorgersen, of the State of Washington,
and they have one daughter, Phyllis Jean, born October
19, 1921.


Dewey Dallas, born March 17, 1898, is now a student
in the Eclectic Medical College of Cincinnati. He took two
years of preparatory work for his medical course in West
Virginia University, and was there during the war, and had
volunteered and entered the Officers Training Camp at Camp
Taylor, Kentucky, but the armistice was signed before a
commission was issued.


______________________________


X-Message: #2
Date: Sun, 09 Jul 2000 11:30:00 -0400
From: Valerie & Tommy Crook <vfcrook@earthlink.net>
To: WV-FOOTSTEPS-L@rootsweb.com
Message-Id: <4.3.1.0.20000709102801.00c346b0@mail.earthlink.net>
Subject: BIO: GUSTAVUS JOSEPHUS SHAFFER, Preston Co. WV
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The History of West Virginia, Old and New
Published 1923, The American Historical Society, Inc.,
Chicago and New York, Volume III,
pg. 438-439


GUSTAVUS JOSEPHUS SHAFFER.  With the commercial
development of Preston County during the past half century
perhaps no one citizen has been more deeply interested than
Gustavus Josephus Shaffer, always known among his many
friends and associates as Gus J. Shaffer. Mr. Shaffer is
still active in banking and business at Kingwood, and has
long been one of the prominent leaders of the democratic
party in this section of the state.


His grandfather and the founder of the family in Preston
County was Adam Shaffer, a native of Germany, who came
to America just before the Revolutionary war, locating in
Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, and from there removing
to Maryland. In Washington County, Maryland, he mar-
ried Catherine Wotring. She was one of the heroines of
the Revolution. On the day the battle of Brandywine was
fought she was busy molding bullets for the Patriot Army,
and her mother and older sisters raked and set up buck-
wheat while the husband and father was fighting in the
cause of independence. The bullet molds Catherine used
on this occasion can be seen in Aurora, West Virginia,
today. Adam Shaffer immediately after his marriage came
in company with his wife's father to the German settlement
of Aurora, West Virginia, and established his home near
Brookside. Adam and Catherine Shaffer had the follow-
ing children: Tewalt, John, Jacob, Daniel, William, Samuel,
Abraham and Adam, Jr.


Daniel Shaffer, father of Gus J., married Elizabeth Isen-
hart, of a family that was identified with the Colonial
history of Cumberland, Maryland, where Daniel found his
wife. Daniel Shaffer was born in 1805 and lived .out his
busy career on a farm in Brookside in Preston County,
where he died in 1863. His family consisted of five sons
and three daughters:  George Francis; Martin Luther;
Jesse W.; Gustavus Josephus; Arthur McKinley; Susan,
who became the wife of Thomas Humbertson, of Frostburg,
Maryland; Mary R., who was the wife of George Lantz,
of Aurora; and Priscilla, who married James H. Wilson and
died at Aurora. Of these children George Francis entered
the Lutheran ministry and was president of the North
Carolina College at Concord, North Carolina. At the begin-
ning of the Civil war, he was, president of a Female Sem-
inary in that state. After the war he did missionary work
throughout the South, and died at Spartanburg, South
Carolina, full of years and with a life of great usefulness
to his credit.


Daniel Shaffer, father of these children, was a local
minister of the Lutheran Church and a justice of the peace.
He issued a great many marriage licenses and also per-
formed the marriage ceremonies. While he was not a
participant in partisan polities, he was in many ways the
recognized civic leader in his community of Aurora. An-
other son, Martin L., was sheriff of Preston County when
the Civil war came on, and then resigned his office and be-
came a sutler in the Federal Army.


Gus J. Shaffer was born at Aurora in Preston County
January 15, 1847, and he was still a schoolboy when the
Civil war wag being fought. He learned the blacksmith's
trade, and after reaching his majority engaged in merchan-
dising at Fellowsville. A few months later fire destroyed
his stock of goods, and he then removed to Rowlesburg in
Reno District, where he began manufacturing and dealing
in lumber. Two or three years later he moved to Tunnel-
ton, and continued in the lumber business until 1886. Mr.
Shatter was one of the original promoters and stockholders
of the Kingwood Railroad Company. Before the road was
completed he was elected its superintendent, having charge
of the track laying, and continued as superintendent during
the first year of the road's operation. On resigning he
removed to Kingwood, and resumed the lumber and mercan-
tile business. For seventeen years Mr. Shaffer was manag-
ing partner in the Shaffer & Brown Company, one of the
largest mercantile firms in Northern West Virginia. His
partners were the late Junior Brown, Arnold Bonafield and
M. L. Shaffer, and he is the last survivor of these. Mr.
Shaffer is now the oldest man in point of service in the
Bank of Kingwood. For many years he has been one of its
stockholders and vice president, and was also one of the
building committee to erect the handsome bank home a few
years ago.


Like his father, Mr. Shaffer is a "dyed-in-the-wool"
democrat, and has been with that party steadily since
casting his first vote for president for Seymour and Blair
in 1868. He has been on the ticket as a party candidate
several times, greatly reducing the republican majority that
is normal in Preston County. He was once elected justice
of the peace of Kingwood District. He has been a delegate
to state conventions, and helped nominate Governor Mac-
Corkle and other state officers. He was in the convention
which nominated Governor Fleming, and was a partisan of
Colonel Martin, named as the dark horse to break the dead-
lock in the Second Congressional District Democratic Con-
vention. He helped nominate the state democratic leader
William L. Wilson, distinguished author of the Wilson bill,
and he knew that statesman personally.


Mr. Shaffer was reared in the Lutheran Church and
has always regarded himself as a Lutheran. Mrs. Shaffer
is a Methodist, and in the absence of a Lutheran Church at
Kingwood he has given his support to the Methodists and
is one of the trustees of the local society. Many years
ago Mr. Shaffer became a Knight of Pythias, and has a
veteran's medal for a quarter of a century of active mem-
bership.


The first wife of Mr. Shaffer was Louisa Menefee, of
Monongalia County, daughter of John Menefee, who in his
time was a man of prominence in the Newburg district.
Mrs. Shaffer died in 1880, leaving two children: Morris,
a fanner near Tunnelton; and Elizabeth, wife of H. C.
Shaffer, of Cumberland, Maryland. The second wife of
Mr. Shaffer was Florence Thomas, daughter of former
sheriff Elisha Thomas of Preston County, where she was
born. She died in 1888, the mother of three children. The
oldest of these is Frank T., one of the promoters and a
director and salesman in the Kingwood Wholesale Grocery
Company, who married Miss Bessie L. Clark, of Miller,
Ohio. Harry G. Shaffer, a lawyer at Madison, West Vir-
ginia, and a member of the State Senate from the Eighth
District, married Brookie Turley. Jessie, the youngest of
the three children, is the wife of Dr. John W. Gilmore, of
Wheeling, West Virginia.


July 30, 1890, Mr. Shaffer married in Ritchie County,
West Virginia, Miss E. Augusta McNeill, daughter of
Rev. Moore McNeilI, former pastor of the Methodist Epis-
copal Church of Kingwood. Mrs. Augusta Shaffer, who
was a successful teacher before her marriage, received her
certificate of membership in the Kingwood Chapter of the
Daughters of the American Revolution in January, 1920.
She is entitled to wear four bars, indicating her Revolu-
tionary ancestry through four soldiers of the war.


______________________________


X-Message: #3
Date: Sun, 09 Jul 2000 11:48:00 -0400
From: Valerie & Tommy Crook <vfcrook@earthlink.net>
To: WV-FOOTSTEPS-L@rootsweb.com
Message-Id: <4.3.1.0.20000709111002.00c4c100@mail.earthlink.net>
Subject: BIO: BENJAMIN T. NEAL, JR.  Wood Co. WV
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The History of West Virginia, Old and New
Published 1923, The American Historical Society, Inc.,
Chicago and New York, Volume III,
pg. 459-460
Wood


BENJAMIN T. NEAL, JR. The ancestor of the Neal family
was Capt. James Neal, who changed his name from O'Neal
during the Revolutionary war because one of his brothers
was a colonel in the British Army. Capt. James Neal
was born about 1737, and raised a company to join Wash-
ington's Army at Valley Forge and subsequently was offered
a commission as major in the army of General Greene.
After the war he returned to his home in Greene County
Pennsylvania. He keenly felt the poverty of the frontier,
and is said to have sold a land grant of four thousand
acres in Ohio for three hundred dollars. In the spring of
1783, as a deputy surveyor, he surveyed the preemption
right and settlement claim of Alexander Parker of Pitts-
burgh, the land upon which the city of Parkersburg has
since been built. In the fall of 1786 he again left Penn-
sylvania, with a party of men bound for the Kentucky
country, but he and some of his companions stopped at the
mouth of Little Kanawha and decided to make permanent
settlement. Here they erected the block house afterward
known as Neal's Station, the first structure of the kind in
what is now Wood County. In the spring of 1787 Captain
Neal returned with his family to Neal's Station. During
succeeding years, until the victory of General Wayne in
1795, this settlement was exposed to recurring raids of
Indians, during one of which a son of Captain Neal was
killed. He was not only the first settler but always first
in the affairs of his neighborhood until his death, which
occurred at Neal's Station in February, 1822. He was a
captain of Frontier Rangers, and held the office of justice
of the peace and commissioner for the examination of sur-
veyors. His first wife, Hannah Hardin, who died in 1784
was a sister of Col. John Hardin, a distinguished char-
acter of the Revolution and founder of the Hardin family
of Kentucky. She was the mother of all but one of Capt
James Neal's children. His two sons who continued his
posterity under the family name were John and James
Hardin.


Of these John Neal was born in Greene County Penn-
sylvania, May 10, 1776, and died October 14, 1823. He
was prominent in the affairs of Wood County, was a mem-
ber of the County Court from May 12, 1800, until his
death, served as high sheriff from 1807 to 1809, and in
1809 was elected a member of the House of Burgesses of
Virginia, serving two terms. In 1796 he married Ephlis
Hook, who was born about 1780 and died June 27, 1852.
She was the mother of thirteen children, fourth among
whom was Cincinnatus James Neal.


Cincinnatus James Neal, representing the third genera-
tion of the family in Wood County, was born January 1
1803, and died August 25, 1869. On February 24, 1836,
he married Mary Ann Collins. Their children were: Vir-
ginia M., Benjamin Tomlinson, Mary L., John Collins
Narcissa P., Guy A., Libbie B., Eliza K. and Deric P.
Cincinnatus Neal during a number of years was a mer-
chant in Parkersburg, and subsequently at Cleveland, Ohio.
His son, Benjamin Tomlinson Neal, Sr., was born at Park-
ersburg in February, 1838, and in 1867 was appointed the
first agent at Parkersburg for the Adams Express Com-
pany. With this corporation he remained a faithful and
responsible employe and official for more than forty years.
In 1884 he was transferred to Columbus, Ohio, where he
remained until he retired in 1910, but he died at Parkers-
burg. His wife, Sallie Burns Shrewsbury, was born June
24, 1840, and died December 18, 1881.  She was the
mother of four children: Fannie S., wife of Frank P.
Moats; Benjamin Tomlinson, Jr.; Edward Burns, court
official; and Wellington V.


Benjamin T. Neal, Jr., who therefore represents the
fifth generation of the family in Wood County, was born
December 2, 1873. He acquired a public school educa-
tion, and since the age of sixteen has been connected with
the banking business at Parkersburg. For fifteen years
he was an employe of the Second National Bank, but since
1903 has been with the Union Trust & Deposit Company,
of which he is treasurer. He is a member of the Benevolent
and Protective Order of Elks. The church of the family
is the Episcopal and nearly all those descended from Cin-
cinnatus Neal have been republicans in polities.


Benjamin T. Neal, Jr., married Mabelle Armstrong,
daughter of William and Emily (Shannon) Armstrong.
Their two children are Clifford B. and Emily A., and Clif-
ford is now the only descendant in the fourth generation
of the family of Cincinnatus Neal.