WV-FOOTSTEPS-D Digest Volume 00 : Issue 169 Today's Topics: #1 BIO: EDWIN MINER KEATLEY, Kanawha [Valerie & Tommy Crook <vfcrook@ear] #2 BIO: JOHN L. MAHAN, Hancock Co. WV [Valerie & Tommy Crook <vfcrook@ear] #3 BIO: PHELPS & HOLLORAN Kanawha Co. [Valerie & Tommy Crook <vfcrook@ear] ______________________________X-Message: #1 Date: Tue, 11 Jul 2000 21:22:27 -0400 From: Valerie & Tommy Crook <vfcrook@earthlink.net> To: WV-FOOTSTEPS-L@rootsweb.com Message-Id: <4.3.1.0.20000711212227.00c66100@mail.earthlink.net> Subject: BIO: EDWIN MINER KEATLEY, Kanawha Co. WV Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed The History of West Virginia, Old and New Published 1923, The American Historical Society, Inc., Chicago and New York, Volume III, pg. 496-497 Kanawha EDWIN MINER KEATLEY, of Charleston, has been a West Virginian thirty years, and his versatile activities and broad interests give his career a most unusual permanence among citizens who are entitled to state-wide recognition. Mr. Keatley for many years was a mining engineer, asso- ciated with some of the early developments in the West Virginia coal fields, has been both a State and Federal official, is now speaker of the House of Delegates in the West Virginia Legislature, and is also president of the American Constitutional Association of West Virginia. Mr. Keatley was born in Barton, Tioga County, New York, May 12, 1868, son of Rev. William and Elizabeth (Swallow) Keatley. Rev. William Keatley was born in County Tyrone, Ireland, son of an Episcopalian minister, while his mother was a Gordon of Scotland, of close kin to Chinese Gordon. William Keatley came to the United States at the age of twenty-two, in 1851, studied for the ministry in the Wyoming Seminary at Kingston, Pennsyl- vania, and practically his entire career as a minister was devoted to service in the Wyoming Conference at Pennsyl- vania. In that section he married Elizabeth Swallow, mem- ber of an historic family of the Wyoming Valley. The Swallow family settled in Wyoming Valley from Con- necticut, and the grandfather of Elizabeth Swallow entered the Revolutionary army from that section. The maternal grandfather of Elizabeth Swallow was John Cooper, a famous Indian fighter, who participated in the Wyoming Valley massacre. A cousin of Elizabeth Swallow was Rev. Silas Swallow, of the Wyoming Valley, who was twice a candidate of the prohibition party for President. Edwin M. Keatley was educated in the public schools of Pennsylvania, in the Wyoming Seminary at Kingston, and gained a thorough technical training for his profession of mining engineering, which he followed for nineteen years. For two years he was topographer in the employ of the State Geological Survey of Pennsylvania, and left that work to go with the banking house of J. P. Morgan & Company of New York as a mining engineer. It was the Morgan interests that sent him to West Virginia in 1891, as chief engineer to look after the coal lands belonging to what is known as the Beaver Coal Company, a subsidiary of the Morgan interests in Raleigh County. That was the be- ginning of Mr. Keatley's thirty years' residence in West Virginia. His subsequent connection was with the John Cooper & Company coal mining interests, owning mines on the Norfolk & Western Railway. He served as engineer for this company about five years, with headquarters at Bramwell in Mercer County. In the meantime Mr. Keatley had been turning his ver- satile talents to the study of law, and in 1897 he went to the State University at Morgantown and took .the examina- tion for admission to the bar and was licensed to practice. In the same year he removed to Charleston, having been appointed assistant attorney general of the state under Attorney General Edgar P. Rucker. He continued in this work during Mr. Pucker's administration, and then engaged in private practice at Charleston. When the United States Circuit and District courts for the Southern District of West Virginia were established in Charleston Judge Goff, at the solicitation of the Kanawha County bar, appointed Mr. Keatley clerk of the Circuit Court for the new district, and a year later Judge Keller appointed him clerk of the United States District Court. He was clerk of both courts until the Circuit Court was abolished, and continued to serve as clerk of the United States District Court from July 1, 1901, to July 1, 1918, when, after seventeen years in the office, he resigned to give his attention to his business affairs. Mr. Keatley is president and a large stockholder of the Virginian Electric & Machine Works, one of Charleston's leading industrial establishments. This business is manu- facturing and jobbing in electrical and other machinery for mines and mining industries. In a very noteworthy degree Mr. Keatley's career has been one of public service, a service identified with the broader interests of both state and nation. During the World war, in fact throughout the two years of America's participation, he gave his time and abilities unstinted and gratis to the Government as chief clerk of the Southern District Draft Board, which included twenty-seven counties in West Virginia. He had a staff of fourteen clerks, and through his office were handled the registration, classifica- tion and examination of 90 000 men. For several years Mr. Keatley has been a leader in the Charleston Chamber of Commerce, which he served one term as president, two terms as a member of the board of direc- tors, and is now national councillor representing this body in the Chamber of Commerce of the United States at Washington. Mr. Keatley is a member of the State Capitol Commis- sion of West Virginia. This is the commission to which has been entrusted the selection of a site and the construction of a new state capitol to replace the one burned in January, 1921. Through the efforts of the commission West Vir- ginia is assured for the first time in its history as a state of a really dignified and impressive capitol building. The designer of the new capitol is Cass Gilbert of New York, who designed the Woolworth Building and many other famous structures. Reference has been made to the fact that Mr. Keatley is the present speaker of the House of Delegates in the State Legislature. He was elected a member of the Legislature in 1920, on the republican ticket, to represent Kanawha County. In the first session of that body he received the unusual honor of being made speaker, a distinction seldom conferred upon any but old-time members, and in itself a distinctive if not unique honor to the character of Mr. Keatley as a public man. Among his many sided activities it would be appropriate for Mr. Keatley to regard his most beneficent work as that in connection with the American Constitutional Association of West Virginia, of which he is president. This organ- ization is due principally to his efforts and began its program in 1920. It purposes to teach good citizenship according to the principles and ideals of the American Republic, and to counteract radicalism and all other forces that are inimical to justice and good order. Its work is being done primarily through the public school system of the state, and the instruction fostered by the American Con- stitutional Association is directed by one of the bureaus of the State Board of Education. Various publications are issued, and one of the objects of the association is to have a regular school text book on citizenship and Americaniza- tion. The association now has between 800 and 900 mem- bers throughout, the state, representing the very best citizen- ship, and there is a pressing need for such work in West Virginia, where entire districts are made up of industrial population. Mr. Keatley has served as a vestryman of St. John's Episcopal Church at Charleston. He is chairman of the State Council of the National Association of Credit Men, is a Knight Templar and Scottish Rite Mason and Shriner, a member of the Edgewood Country Club of Charleston and a director of the Rotary Club. His first wife was Alethia McCreery, daughter of John W. McCreery, of Beckley, West Virginia. She was the mother of his four older children: Mrs. S. S. Rutherford, of Detroit, Michigan; Capt. Edwin E. Keatley, of the United States Army, now stationed with the Sixty-fifth Infantry at San Juan, Porto Rico; John W., who served eight months in the Marine Corps, is a student in the Uni- versity of Michigan, and a prominent athlete; and Miss Theta Keatley. For his present wife Mr. Keatley married Lenore Gos- ling, daughter of Rev. B. F. Gosling, a clergyman of the Southern Methodist Church. To this marriage were born three children, Richard Hagan, Gordon William and Eliza- beth Swallow Keatley. ______________________________ X-Message: #2 Date: Tue, 11 Jul 2000 22:09:39 -0400 From: Valerie & Tommy Crook <vfcrook@earthlink.net> To: WV-FOOTSTEPS-L@rootsweb.com Message-Id: <4.3.1.0.20000711220851.00c73ba0@mail.earthlink.net> Subject: BIO: JOHN L. MAHAN, Hancock Co. WV Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed The History of West Virginia, Old and New Published 1923, The American Historical Society, Inc., Chicago and New York, Volume III, pg. 509-510 Hancock JOHN L. MAHAN. An early settler of Hancock County. and for many years prominently associated with the river traffic on the Ohio, the late John L. Mahan was also a pioneer in commercial fruit growing in that district, and part of his extensive property is still devoted to that business. He owned about 600 acres in his farm, what is now Arroyo Station, and during his lifetime he planted about 100 acres of that to a commercial orchard. His old home was on the river bank, close to the station, which is four miles north of New Cumberland. The old Mahan residence stood near the Ohio River. Part of the property is now occupied by his son-in-law, W. C. Aikin, whose residence is a quarter of a mile away, on slightly higher ground and commanding a fine view of the river. The background of the home are the hills that rise to an elevation of from 200 to 300 feet. Arroyo is the center of the finest fruit section in the Upper Ohio Valley, and hardly surpassed by the fruit country of the Eastern Panhandle. Near Arroyo are probably a dozen men who make apple growing their leading industry. The higher ridges of land in this sec- tion are especially fitted for the production of most ex- cellent fruit. John L. Mahan settled here in 1840. In early years he operated a saw and grist mill, and he also built barges and was part owner of the Cumberland Tow Boat Company. He did a large timber and barge business. He was an early convert to apple growing on a commercial scale, and the efforts he put forth in this line of development have been continued on his old farm ever since. He died in 1901, at the age of eighty-seven, having lived retired for some years. John L. Mahan married Barbara Brennaman, daughter of Herman Brennaman. She died at the age of sixty-eight. Of their ten children the survivors are a son, J. P. Mahan, an insurance man of Pittsburgh. Another son, S. H. Mahan, at Rochester, Pennsylvania. A daughter, Mrs. Car- rie N. Porter, widow of the late Capt. James Porter, a prominent character of the Upper Ohio Valley, whose his- tory is given elsewhere. Another daughter is Mrs. George W. dark, widow of an old steamboat captain on the lower river. Her home is at Louisville. Mary Mahan, another daughter of the late John L. Mahan, died August 29, 1919, wife of W. C. Aikin, who survives her. They were married in 1889. They lived at the old Mahan residence until 1910. She and her sister, Mrs. Porter, had purchased what remained of the old Mahan estate, and Mrs. Aikin remodeled the house erected by her brother, S. H. Mahan, on part of the old tract. Mrs. Aikin was an active member of the local Methodist Protestant Chapel. W. C. Aikin was born in Mercer County, Pennsylvania, and at the age of fifteen came to Wellsburg, West Vir- ginia. For three years he was employed in a drug store, and he then became an office employe of a steamboat com- pany, and was in the river traffic for about fourteen years, part of the time as captain. He was on steamboats all along the Ohio and Mississippi and their tributaries, and once or twice went up the Missouri to Fort Benton, Mon- tana. After leaving the river he was a bookkeeper in a brick yard at New Cumberland, and for seventeen years devoted his time to fruit growing and stock raising on the Mahan farm. He developed a fine dairy herd of Guernsey cattle. The manager of the orchard is William McDonald, who lives with Mr. Aikin. Mr. Aikin has a life interest in the farm and receives half of the profits. He has been an active citizen in this community, and for twenty years has been on the school board and has kept in close touch with school developments in the district. ______________________________ X-Message: #3 Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2000 06:19:51 -0400 From: Valerie & Tommy Crook <vfcrook@earthlink.net> To: WV-FOOTSTEPS-L@rootsweb.com Message-Id: <4.3.1.0.20000712061951.00b99c00@mail.earthlink.net> Subject: BIO: PHELPS & HOLLORAN Kanawha Co. WV Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed The History of West Virginia, Old and New Published 1923, The American Historical Society, Inc., Chicago and New York, Volume III, pg. 495-496 Kanawha PHELPS & HOLLORAN are a firm of Charleston brick con- tractors, representing technical skill and experience, thorough business capacity, and a service of prompt and reliable fulfillment. This firm has handled some very large and important contracts in and around Charleston. The best statement of the quality of their work is refer- ence to some of the completed contracts themselves. At Charleston they built the Schwamb Memorial Church, the Soloff Hotel, the Tennessee Avenue Garage, the nine apart- ment building of Simon Cohen, the Union Mission Nursery Building, the Knights of Pythias Hall and the Security Bank Building, to mention only a few among a larger number. They were also contractors for the Alderson Bap- tist Academy at Alderson, West Virginia, one of the finest and most modern educational plants in the state. They built the Clendenin High School at Clendenin. Jess W. Holloran, of this firm, was born in Appomat- tox County, Virginia, but when he was a year old his par- ents removed to Lynchburg, that state, where he was reared and educated. In that city he learned the trade of brick mason, and he knows the trade and business from the stand- point of practical experience in every detail. He worked as a journeyman at Lynchburg and in other cities, and sub- sequently became a brick contractor. In 1918 he removed his home to Charleston, West Virginia, where he formed his partnership with S. H. Phelps, under the name Phelps & Holloran. Mr. Holloran is secretary of the Mason Con- tractors Association of Charleston. S. H. Phelps is a native of Lynchburg, Virginia. As a youth he learned the brick mason's trade under Mr. Hol- loran, his present partner. They have been more or less closely associated ever since. Mr. Phelps, however, moved to Charleston in 1912, and his work has attracted con- siderable attention, so as to give an extensive business to the firm as soon as Phelps & Holloran constituted their partnership in 1918. They have since had a prominent part in the great growth and expansion of Charleston.