Search

Newspaper clippings, mainly from Doddridge and Harrison county, concerning marriages, deaths, family histories, letters from World War I service men, nurses, and from former residents who had moved, or gone to other states to teach, including a series of letters from L.P. Willis from the Phillippine Islands and Japan. Mr.Willis was employed as a teacher and Head Of the Bureau of Education in Japan, and the Phillipines for twenty years. Also, included in the collection are tax and school tuition receipts, orders,unsigned copy of Thomas Hickman's will, deed and other papers of several members of the Hickman family of Harrison county. A photostat copy of a form letter from the State Medical Society Committee on Examination of the Medical Botany of the State addressed to Dr.P. Davis from Wheeling, 1868.

Collection includes family correspondence of the Bowman, Veach, and Leeper families. Manuscripts include a recounting of the Civil War event known as "Jones' Raid." In another document Nathaniel Cochrane, an ancestor of Thomas Leeper, recounts his capture and imprisonment by indigenous people, along with a biography of Cochrane. Daily life for that time is captured in "Home Life of the Leeper Family." Other typescript histories include "Monongah," Thomas Leeper's diary regarding heavy rains and high waters of 1888, a history of West Monongah High School, and "History of the Leeper Family."

Records regarding the history of the White Day Creek region of Marion County, WV. There are also photocopies of primary sources of information supplementary to the White Day Creek book, including: letters and financial ledger of the Watson family (1820-1890); essay titled "Smithtown Local History" (1922); business ledger of George Washington Stevens, a cobbler (1890s); deeds and estate sale documents of William Morris (1854); grist mill business ledger of Sam Smith (1894); financial ledger and "folk wisdom" of Levi Devault (ca. 1875-1900); and the history of the Weaver family, including estate sale information (1854). The history of education in Marion County is documented in the photocopied "1992 Dedication of the Snodgrass One-Room Schoolhouse Museum; October 30, 1992." (Original in Printed Ephemera Collection.) This dedication program also features a reminiscence of Ethel Ferrell (b. 1898), a Marion County school teacher.

Correspondence, diaries, sketch books, published and unpublished manuscripts, literary notes, business records, and printed material of a schoolteacher, newspaper writer, county historian, novelist and essayist from Kingwood, whose fiction and nonfiction writings deal primarily with the Virginia-West Virginia Allegheny highlands. His best known works are WINNING OR LOSING?: A STORY OF THE WEST VIRGINIA HILLS (1901); LAND OF THE LAUREL: A STORY OF THE ALLEGHANIES (1903); UNDER THE COTTONWOODS: A SKETCH OF LIFE ON A PRAIRIE HOMESTEAD (1900); and histories of Preston, Pendleton, and Monroe counties. The collection also includes a manuscript temperance paper, "The Meridian Temperance Banner," 1880; and a list of marriage bonds for Monroe County, 1799-1846.