WVWest Virginia Famous People

The first famous West Virginians were born Virginians

The state did not exist until June 20, 1863, so every native born before that date entered the world in Virginia. Thomas Jonathan Jackson was born in Clarksburg in 1824, orphaned early, and ended up commanding Confederate troops against the mountain counties he came from; the nickname Stonewall was pinned on him at Bull Run in 1861. Booker T. Washington was born enslaved in Virginia's Franklin County, but the family walked to Malden in the Kanawha valley after emancipation, and it was there, packing salt and working a coal seam, that he learned to read before walking most of the way to Hampton Institute. Anna Jarvis, born in Webster in 1864, organised the first Mother's Day service at Andrews Methodist Church in Grafton in 1908 for her late mother, then spent her remaining decades and most of her money attacking the florists and greeting card firms that took the holiday over. She was arrested once for disturbing the peace at a carnation sale.

No president, but one man on the ballot

The White House has never had a West Virginian. The nearest thing is John W. Davis of Clarksburg, born 1873, who took 103 ballots to win the Democratic nomination in 1924 and then lost to Calvin Coolidge by one of the widest margins on record. He argued well over a hundred cases at the Supreme Court, including the losing defence of segregation in the South Carolina case folded into Brown v. Board. Robert C. Byrd, born in North Carolina and raised in the coal camps around Stotesbury, entered Congress in 1953 and sat in the Senate from 1959 until 2010, longer than anyone in American history. Jennings Randolph of Salem first proposed lowering the voting age to eighteen in 1942 and kept reintroducing the measure until the 26th Amendment passed in 1971. Cyrus Vance, another Clarksburg native, was Secretary of State from 1977 and resigned in 1980 over the Tehran hostage rescue attempt, the first to quit the office on principle since 1915.

A NASA computer, a Nobel mathematician, a test pilot

Katherine Johnson was born in White Sulphur Springs in 1918, finished high school at fourteen and West Virginia State at eighteen, and calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard's flight in 1961. Before John Glenn went into orbit the following year he asked for her by name and would not fly until she had checked the electronic computer's figures by hand. John Nash was born in Bluefield in 1928 and wrote a Princeton dissertation of under thirty pages that reorganised economics, then shared the Nobel in 1994 after decades of schizophrenia. Chuck Yeager, from Myra in Lincoln County, cracked two ribs falling off a horse two nights before he flew the Bell X-1 through the sound barrier on October 14, 1947, and had a friend saw off a broom handle so he could pull the hatch shut with one arm. Homer Hickam was launching homemade rockets over the slack dumps at Coalwood after Sputnik, became a NASA engineer, and wrote the memoir filmed as October Sky.

Cabin Creek, Fairmont and the silhouette on the logo

Jerry West grew up in Chelyan on Cabin Creek, scored 2,309 points in three varsity seasons at West Virginia University, and won Olympic gold in 1960. The NBA has never confirmed that its logo is his silhouette, though the designer said it came from a photograph of West dribbling. Fairmont produced two more: Mary Lou Retton, born 1968, who scored perfect tens on floor and vault to become the first American woman to win the Olympic all around title in 1984, and Nick Saban, born 1951, who pumped gas at his father's service station in Idamay before winning seven national championships as a college football coach. Randy Moss came from Rand, a few miles from where West grew up, and was a state champion in basketball and track before the NFL. Sam Huff came out of the No. 9 coal camp at Edna Gas and into the Hall of Fame as a linebacker.

Slab Fork, Glen Dale and Welch

Bill Withers was born in the coal town of Slab Fork in 1938 and was still making parts for Boeing 747s when Ain't No Sunshine came out in 1971, because he did not trust the record business. Grandma's Hands and Lean on Me both came out of that childhood. Don Knotts was born in Morgantown in 1924 and won five Emmys playing Barney Fife. Brad Paisley grew up in Glen Dale with a guitar his grandfather gave him and had a regular spot on Wheeling's Jamboree USA as a teenager. Steve Harvey was born in Welch in 1957 and moved to Cleveland as a boy. Kathy Mattea came from Cross Lanes, and Jennifer Garner was raised in Charleston. Pearl S. Buck was born in Hillsboro in 1892 while her missionary parents were on leave from China, won the Pulitzer for The Good Earth in 1932, and in 1938 became the first American woman awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Matewan, Blair Mountain and the miners

Sid Hatfield, police chief of Matewan, sided with evicted miners against Baldwin-Felts detectives in May 1920, and the shootout in the street killed seven agents, the town mayor and two miners. Hatfield was shot dead, unarmed, on the McDowell County courthouse steps in Welch in August 1921. Roughly 10,000 miners took up arms and marched on Logan County, and the Battle of Blair Mountain that followed was the largest armed uprising in the country since the Civil War, ending only when federal troops arrived. Mother Jones, Irish born and past eighty, had walked the same coalfields in the Paint Creek strike of 1912.

Notable people from bordering states

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