Augusta County Virginia USGenWeb Archives Biographies.....Clendinin, Charles 
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Alice Warner Brosey http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00015.html#0003503 September 4, 2009, 9:58 am

Source: Kanawha County section, History of West Virginia 1889
Author: Virgil A. Lewis

The founders of the city were the Clendenins. The emigrant ancestors of the
family in the United States Were three brothers, one of whom settled at
Baltimore and became the ancestor of the Clendenin family of Maryland; a second,
Archibald, with his family, found a home on the Virginia frontier, where himself
and family were murdered by the Indians at the time of the destruction of the
Greenbrier settlements in 1763. Charles, the third of the brothers, was residing
in Augusta county as early as 1752. It is not known at what date he came west of
the mountains, but that he was living on Greenbrier river within the limits of
Greenbrier county as early as 1780, is a matter of record. He had issue four
sons and one daughter— George, William, Robert, Ellen Mary and Alexander.

George, the eldest, was born about the year 1746. He was a distinguished
frontiersman, long engaged in the Indian wars, and a soldier in General Lewis'
army at the battle of Point Pleasant. In June, 1788, he, with Colonel John
Stuart, represented Greenbrier county in the Virginia Convention which ratified
the Federal Constitution.

Whilst in Richmond, he met Judge Bullitt, from whom he purchased the lands upon
which Charleston now stands, and in the autumn of the last named year,
accompanied by his aged father and brothers and sisters, removed to the mouth of
Elk river, where, the same year, they reared the first structure ever built on
the site of the present capital of West Virginia. Within it, Charles Clendenin,
the father, died about the year 1790, and was buried near by. When the county
was formed, in 1789, George Clendenin furnished the blank books, for which the
court allowed him nineteen hundred and twenty pounds of tobacco. Here he
continued to reside until 1796, when he removed to Marietta, Ohio, where he died
in 1797. His wife died at Point Pleasant in 1815. The structure reared by him
was long known in pioneer annals as "Clendenin's Fort," and through the efforts
of the venerable Dr. John P. Hale a portion of it is still preserved, and now
used as a residence. Several daring pioneers accompanied the Clendenins to the
Kanawha, among them being Josiah Harrison, Francis Watkins, Charles McClung,
John Edwards, Lewis Tackett and Shaderick Harriman. Of the latter, the
historian, John P. Hale, in his valuable work, "Trans-Allegheny Pioneers," says:
"Shaderick Harriman, then (1794) living at the mouth of Lower Venable Branch,
two miles above Charleston, on the south side, was the last person killed by
Indians in the Kanawha Valley."

Charleston, contracted from "Charles' Town," first named in honor of Charles
Clendenin, was made a town by legislative enactment December 19, 1794, with
Reuben Slaughter, Andrew Donnally, Sr., Leonard Morris, George Alderson, Abraham
Baker, John Young and William Morris, trustees.


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