Daniel Boone was a resident of western Virginia (now West Viriginia) and resided in Point Pleasant. Boone County in West Virginia was named after Daniel Boone in honor of his heroics and leadership.
Thomas (Stonewall) Jackson was born in 1824 at Clarksburg. Born a natural leader, he was serving as constable of Lewis County at the age of 17. Graduated from West Point in 1846 and after 6 years in the Federal Army he attained the rank of Major. In 1861, Jackson took command of the Virginia Volunteers. Jackson's triumphant campaign was cut short by his own men's bullets.
Booker Taliaferro Washington was one of three West Virginians elected to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans. (The others were Daniel Boone and Stonewall Jackson.) Born a slave on a Hale's Ford Virginia plantation in 1856, when few blacks could read or write, he learned to read from a Blue-Back Speller. After the Emancipation Proclamation, Washington came to Malden, West Virginia where he attended a Negro school. Economic needs forced him to work during the day and study at night with the aid of Mrs. Viola Ruffner. He later attended school at the Hampton Institute in Virginia. After graduation he returned to Malden to teach school for two years. He later went on to take charge of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. By 1895, Washington had built Tuskegee into the nation's model black industrial, vocational and agricultural college.
Grafton, West Virginia. Here, a mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, worshiped and taught Sunday School for thirty years in Andrews Church. And here, on Sunday, May 10, 1908, three years after her death, the first Mother's Day service took place, on request of her daughter, Anna. Then, from that Sunday in 1908, Daughter Anna spent all her life and money on Mother's Day. In 1948, Anna died, blind and penniless, never herself achieving the blessing she exalted with her life....motherhood.What irony! On Mother's Day, no one can wear the traditional Mother's Day white carnation for its founder, Miss Anna Jarvis.
Three of the most popular legendary figures to emerge from the founding of our nation were Paul Bunyan of the Pacific Northwest, Pecos Bill of the Southwestern Desert, and West Virginia's John Henry, heroic black man who died with his hammer in his hand while proving a human being is better than a machine. There's a difference between John Henry and the two other folk heroes mentioned above, however: Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill were mythical characters, while John Henry was a real man who worked on track gang in West Virginia during the 1870s when the C&O Railroad was boring a mile-long tunnel through the Big Bend Mountain in scenic Summers County. He was one of the hundreds of freed slaves who helped build railroads throughout this area during the Reconstruction Period that followed the Civil War. Like many other epic stories, the John Henry legend was born of need. It gave the newly freed blacks of that time a strong, positive model with whom they could identify and look to with pride. And his legendary victory over the steam drill gave them tangible proof that a human being was inherently worth more than the machines which were beginning to take their jobs. The legend was first developed and passed along in work songs and ballads. According to these songs, John Henry was the son of slave parents in the Old South. He was given super human powers that enabled him to walk and talk at birth and to foresee the future. Including his own death, with a hammer in his hand. By the time he was a teenager, he stood better than six feet tall and weighed more than 250 pounds, and could outwork any nine men with ease. After the end of the Civil War, John Henry drifted north to West Virginia and got a job on the track gang driving long, steel blasting rods into the rocky mountainside. His strength and endurance soon became legend among the work crews and it was only natural, according to the storytellers, that he would be the one to challenge the steam drill brought in by a salesman who claimed the machine could do the work of ten men. The race pitting man against machine began early one morning and John Henry, with a 12-pound hammer in each hand, drove steel into the rocks all day long without pause. Legend has it that the sparks flew like lightning and his hammer rang like thunder. When dusk came, the race was over, and the machine was defeated, and the workers' jobs were safe. But they had lost their hero, who, according to the ballads, sank down and died of exhaustion, his head cradled in his beloved's lap, and his hammer still in his hand.
'Ain't no hammer, Rings like mine
Rings like gold, Ain't it fine!
Rings like silver, Peal on peal.
Into the rock, Drive the steel.
If''n I dies, I command
Bury the hammer in my hand.'
Although most people aren't aware of it, more than 5,000 black slaves lived and worked in what is now known as West Virginia during the latter part of the 18th Century.
