BIOGRAPHY OF CURTIS E. PRUNTY, HARRISON CO,
WEST VIRGINIA

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Submitted by Valerie Crook
(vfcrook@earthlink.net)


The History of West Virginia, Old and New
Published 1923, The American Historical Society, Inc.,
Chicago and New York, Volume II,
pg. 589
Harrison

CURTIS EARL PRUNTY. The business of real estate in a
broad sense should also involve real estate improvement
and development, and it has been in this natural combina-
tion of related lines that Mr. Prunty has become an im-
portant factor in the business affairs of Clarksburg during
the past two decades.

Mr. Prunty was born on his father's farm in Doddridge
County, West Virginia, February 22, 1878, son of Hughie
Benton and Martha Ann (Cross) Prunty, the former a
native of Harrison County and the latter of Ritchie County.
His parents spent their married life on a farm in Doddridge
County, where the father died in 1906 at the age of fifty-
nine, while the mother passed away in 1889. Their children
consisted of three sons and four daughters.

Curtis E. Prunty had as youth on the farm, acquired
his education in the country schools. His last experience
after farming was as a wage worker for James Maxwell,
a Doddridge County farmer. The wages were too small to
give promise of any future, and at the age of nineteen he
left the farm to become an employe of the Eureka Pipe
Line Company. He was with that company one year and
in 1899 removed to Salem, West Virginia, where he soon
after took up building construction work. With accumulat-
ing capital, credit and experience, he invested in real estate
in Salem, but his ambitions soon led him to a larger field
for his promising business and in 1900 he located at Clarks-
burg. Since then he has handled real estate and building
construction, and has been instrumental in developing some
of Clarksburg's most attractive sub-divisions and vacant
property. He organized in 1909 the Prunty Real Estate
Company of which he is president. This company laid out
and marketed a sub-division known as the White and Stone-
wall Park additions. The Prunty building in Clarksburg
was erected in 1914, as a modern office building, and Mr.
Prunty now has under way a supplementary building, front-
ing on Third Street and connecting on the rear with the
present Prunty building. This new structure is planned
ultimately to rise eleven stories.

Mr. Prunty has never married. He is president of the
Bland Realty Company, a director in the Percy Oil Com-
pany, and the Clarksburg Trust Company of which he was
an active organizer. He is a republican and a member
of The Old Colony Club of New York.