Berkeley County, West Virginia Biography of Elisha Boyd FAULKNER This file was submitted by CJ Towery, E-mail address: The submitter does not have a connection to the subject of this sketch. This file may be freely copied by individuals and non-profit organizations for their private use. All other rights reserved. Any other use, including publication, storage in a retrieval system, or transmission by electronic, mechanical, or other means requires the written approval of the file's author. This file is part of the WVGenWeb Archives. If you arrived here inside a frame or from a link from somewhere else, our front door is at http://www.usgwarchives.net/wv/wvfiles.htm The History of West Virginia, Old and New Published 1923, The American Historical Society, Inc., Chicago and New York, Volume II, page 222 ELISHA BOYD FAULKNER, who was a resident of Martinsburg, Berkeley County, at the time of his death, honored the State of West Virginia by his distinguished service as a lawyer, jurist, public official and citizen of fine character and high ideals. He was born in the community known as Boydville, near the present city of Martinsburg, West Virginia, on the 24th of July, 1841, and was a son of Charles James Faulkner and Mary W. (Boyd) Faulkner. He received excellent educational advantages in his youth, including those of Winchester Academy, Georgetown College and the University of Virginia. While an attache of the American Legation in the City of Paris, France, he there attended lectures on constitutional law, and he became one of the authorities in this phase of law in West Virginia. After serving as a soldier of the Confederacy in the Civil war he refused to take the test oath required in West Virginia, and from 1867 to 1872 he was engaged in the practice of law in Kentucky. In the latter year he returned to Martinsburg and resumed the practice of law. In 1876 he was elected to the House of Delegates of the State Legislature, and in 1878 to the State Senate, the presidency of which body he declined. He was appointed a member of the committee chosen by the Legislature to revise the laws of the state, and in 1884 he was defeated for nomination for the office of governor of West Virginia at the State Democratic Convention in Wheeling. Under the administration of President Cleveland Judge Faulkner was tendered and declined appointment as consul general at Cairo, Egypt, and also that of minister to Persia. He was appointed to the bench of the Thirteenth Judicial District of West Virginia, he having been at the time attorney for the Baltimore & Ohio and the Cumberland Valley Railroads, as well as other important corporations. By successive re-elections he continued his service on the bench for more than twenty-one years, and then declined again to become a candidate for re-election. He was a trustee of the Berkeley Springs Corporation, and politically was a stalwart democrat. His initial military service was with the Wise Artillery, later he was a member of the Rockbridge Artillery and thereafter he became a member of the military staff of Governor Letcher of Virginia. When the Civil war came he was appointed a captain in the Provisional Confederate Army, and in June, 1864, be was captured at the battle of Piedmont. For a year thereafter he was held a captive at Johnson's Island. He took part in many engagements, fought loyally and gallantly in defense of a cause, which he believed to be just, and at the first battle of Manassas he received wounds in one of his ears from the fragment of an exploding shell. February 11, 1868, recorded the marriage of Judge Faulkner and Miss Susan Campbell, daughter of John P. Campbell, a leading citizen of Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in which locality he had large landed interests and also important financial investments. Mr. Campbell, of Scotch lineage, died at the venerable age of eighty years. The maiden name of his wife was Mary Buckner, and she was an aunt of Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner. Judge and Mrs. Faulkner became the parents of two daughters, Mary Buckner and Nannine Holmes, the latter of whom died in 1883.