ROBINSON, CHARLES P. -
has figured conspicuously in the lumber circles of South
Carolina over a quarter of a century. He is vice president and
manager and founder of the Southern Wholesale Lumber Company
with manufacturing plant and headquarters at Columbia.
Mr.
Robinson was born in Tyler County, West Virginia, April 24, 1867. He
had a public school education and in early life went into the lumber
woods and acquired a practical knowledge of the lumber business from
the cutting of the trees through the operation of saw mills to the
general distribution of the product. He has been a resident of South
Carolina since 1895, and for several years operated mills in
different sections of the state. He organized in 1917 the Southern
Wholesale Lumber Company, of which he is vice president and general
manager. This company manufactures large quantities of South
Carolina lumber and also deals in lumber products brought from many
sources.
Mr. Robinson in private life is well known as a
temperance worker, is active in the First Presbyterian Church and
one of the teachers in the Sunday school. August 18, 1891, he
married Eddie S. Smithson of Virginia.
[History of South Carolina, By Yates Snowden,
Harry Gardner Cutler, 1920 - Transcribed by C.
Anthony]
ROOME, EDWARD
A true
type of the self-made man, such as to whom about every community
owes much, is Edward Roome, of Sistersville, who for more than half
a century has been identified with the milling industry of that
place, and is held in respect as one of the foremost advocates and
promoters of the best interests of the town. He is of sturdy English
ancestry.
(1)
William Roome was a native of Yorkshire, England, a region of
notable historic associations. In his young manhood he came to the
United States, remaining for a time in Pennsylvania, then going to
Ohio. While residing there he was one of the most active agents on
the famous old National Pike, over which, before the installations
of railroads, passed the great tide of travel and commerce between
the east and the west.
His
route lay over the most picturesque portion of the road, from
Hillsborough, Pennsylvania, to Washington, in the same state, and
afterwards from Zanesville, Ohio, to Wheeling, West
Virginia.
While
in Zanesville, he married Elizabeth Ryan, a native of Kilkenny,
Ireland, who came to the United States at the same time with her
future husband, making her home in Zanesville. After his marriage,
Mr. Roome moved to Wheeling, West Virginia, and for ten years drove
his teams from that place to Washington, Pennsylvania. He then
located in Marshall county, Virginia, where for five years he gave
his attention to farming and conducting a hotel. In 1852 he removed
to Tyler county, in the same state, where he bought an unimproved
farm, which he brought to a high state of cultivation.
(2)
Edward, son of William and Elizabeth (Ryan) Roome, was born December
20, 1838, in Washington, Pennsylvania. He was nine years old when
his parents took up their home in Marshall county, Virginia, and
fourteen years old when he came to Sistersville, which was destined
to be his home thenceforward to this present time. The school of
that day afforded but meager educational facilities, and it is to
his studious habits at home and his determination to aquire
knowledge that he is chiefly indebted for his mental training. His
first employment was training, but his disposition led him to more
of a mechanical and commercial life.
In
1872, he rented his father-in-law’s custom grist mill and conducted
it on his own account, and he has ever since been continuously
identified with the milling industry. He kept pace with every
improvement in milling processes, adapting his plant to necessities
as they arose and keeping fully abreast with all modernizations from
time to time. Mr. Roome has at the same time been actively concerned
in various other lines of business, and in which he has been equally
successful. He is an extensive hay dealer, drawing his supplies
mainly from Ohio and Michigan. In 1892 an oil well was opened upon
his farm, and operated under lease, and he received in payment the
very first check ever drawn for oil produced in Tyler county, and
from that time has steadily derived revenue from that source. A
resident of Sistersville for sixty years, he has been prominently
identified with all its various interests, and its advancement has
been in no small degree due to his enterprise and untiring efforts.
Since 1893 he has been one of the directors of the Peoples National
Bank of Sistersville, having that year assisted in its
reorginazition, it haveing been known originally known as the
Farmers and Producers Bank. For ten years he has been a member of
the city council, and one of its foremost factors in village
improvement. He was one of the first to discern in advance the
opportunity of paving and sewering, and to his public-spirited
ambition and invincible determination were largely due the success
of the project. Time has justified the wisdom of his course, as it
is now gratefully acknowledged by many who were at the time
opponents of the enterprise.
Mr.
Roome is a staunch Democrat in politics, an Episcopalian in
religious preference, and is affiliated with the Masonic fraternity.
He has traveled extensively throughout the United States and Canada,
and has also visited Cuba. In 1858 and 1859 he was in New Orleans.
Lousiana, and counts among the most distressing and heart-rending
experiences of his life the slave auction which he witnessed, the
seperation of husbands and wives, parents and children, as they were
sold apart from each other.
Mr.
Roome married, january 5, 1871, in Sistersville, Virginia Stocking,
born in Batavia, New York, August 1836, daughter of Philo W.
Stocking and Nancy Jane (Wandelore) Stocking. Children: 1. Georgiana
Elizabeth, wife of W. O. Harrington, adealer in oil properties, and
a resident of Sistersville; children: Elizabeth, Mary and Edward,
the last being his grandfathers namesake. 2> William W., died in
1900. #. mary Alberts, wife of ______ Sutherland, deceased; she
resides with her parents, and has a daughter, Helen
Virginia.
[Submitted by Rodney
Henthorn]
Russell, Hon. Charles
Wells
Hon.
Charles W. Russell was a distinguished man in Northwestern Virginia prior to the rebellion. He was a man
of unusual brilliancy as well as the possessor of solid parts and great learning. He was distinguished both
in law and in politics, and possessed almost unlimited influence among
the people of his section of the State. He died just as his sun had
reached its noon, and left an
untarnished name as a heritage to his devoted family.
Mr.
Russell was born at Sistersville, Tyler County, Virginia, July 19, 1818. During his earlier
years he received a common school education, and as he was growing into manhood he went to
Wheeling and became a student at Linsly
Institute, and later finished his
general education by graduating from Jefferson College at
Cannonsburgh, Pennsylvania. He subsequently studied law in the
office of the late Z. Jacob at Wheeling; and
after being admitted to the bar
practiced his profession in Wheeling, with unusual success,
until the breaking out of the war in 1861. He then went South and served two, if not three, terms in the
Virginia Legislature. He was also a
member of the House of Representatives in both the "Provisional"
and the "Permanent" Congress of the
Southern Confederacy. In these Legislative and
forensic bodies, as well as at the bar,
his great powers as an orator and
debator were demonstrated. In these particulars but few of
the great Virginians of his time were his equal.
At the end
of the war he went to Canada, where he remained until the Spring of
1866, when he settled in Baltimore, and
resumed the practice of law. He was becoming well established
as a leading attorney at that distinguished bar
when he died, November 22, 1867, leaving a widow and three sons.
He married
Margaret, daughter of the late Henry Moore of Wheeling, and hail three sons, two of whom — Henry Moore
Russell — who practiced law in the city of Wheeling, and became one of the leading lawyers of that
section, and, as a matter of fact, of
the entire State of West Virginia, who
died before reaching the age of sixty, in the midst of his
usefulness and success. The other son,
Charles W. Russell, Jr., who spent many years as an attorney in the
Judiciary Department at Washington, and
for several years ably filled the office as an Assistant
Attorney-General of the United States. He was also several years
Minister of the United States at the capitol of Persia, and is at this time a resident of Washington,
D. C. Henry M. Russell, Jr., son of the late Henry M. Russell, is
now a successful lawyer in the city of Wheeling.
[Bench and bar of West Virginia
edited by George Wesley Atkinson, 1919 – Transcribed by AFOFG]
