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William Erskine Miller
b.1825
d.1901
Facts and Events
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 William Erskine Miller (1825-1901), the Miller's youngest son, married Sarah Barbara (Sally) McNeer (1827-1896) in 1849. As provided in John Miller's will, William inherited half of the Lick Creek farm at his father’s death in 1854 (the other half went to his brother Andrew). William served in the Confederate army during the Civil War. He and Sarah remained on Lick Creek for most of their lives, but around 1891 they apparently sold the family farm, including the house that John Miller had built in the first half of the nineteenth century, and moved to the town of Foss (now Bellepoint). They lived their until their deaths and were buried in the Hill Top Cemetery. An obituary in the Hinton Leader described William as a man “of a most unselfish character and most humane and merciful disposition, with a gentleness in domestic and social life which obtained the admiration of all who knew him, and added to these the character of a consecrated Christian.†The Millers, who were members of the Methodist Episcopal Church South, had four children: Mary Benson Miller (b. 1850?), who remained unmarried and lived much of her life in Hinton; Charles Lewis Miller (b. 1852), a teacher, a telegraph operator, and finally a farmer and merchant in Summers County; James Henry Miller (b. 1857), a prominent lawyer and judge in Hinton; Anderson Embury Miller (1859-1936), a businessman who owned the New River Grocery Company in Hinton.
James Henry Miller, William Erskine Miller's son and John Miller's grandson, was one of the leading citizens of what had by his day become Summers County, West Virginia. He was born on the Miller family farm on Lick Creek and received his early schooling at the Old Gum schoolhouse near his home. He attended school in Green Sulphur Springs, then went on to graduate from Concord Normal School (now Concord College) in Athens, West Virginia, in 1879. He received a law degree from the University of Virginia and was admitted to the bar in 1881. He served as superintendent of schools for Summers County from 1882 to 1884 and as county prosecutor from 1884 to 1900. An active Democrat, he attended the 1896 Chicago convention that nominated William Jennings Bryan and was state chair of the Democratic Party from 1900 to 1904. From 1904 to 1920, he served as judge for the Ninth West Virginia Circuit Court. He was a prominent businessman, with interests in the banking, hardware, and hotel sectors, among others. He also wrote a History of Summers County, West Virginia: From the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time, published in Hinton in 1908, still an important source of information on the history of Summers County and the Miller family. In 1882, he married Jane Tompkins Miller, a daughter of James H. Miller, Jr., of Gauley Bridge (apparently a second cousin). They had four children: James Henry Miller, Jr., who studied law at Washington and Lee University, then practiced with his father in Hinton; Grace Chapman Miller, who married Sven Rose, owner of the Rose Drug Store in Hinton; Daisy Corinne Miller, who married a Gooch; and Jean Miller, about whom nothing is known.
http://boards.ancestry.com/thread.aspx?mv=flat&m=1122&p=surnames.hodge
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