Lewis County, West Virginia Biography of Johnson Newlon CAMDEN ************************************************************************** USGENWEB NOTICE: Material may be freely used by non-commercial entities, as long as this message remains on all copied material, AND permission is obtained from the contributor of the file. These pages may NOT be reproduced in any format for profit or presentation by other organizations. Persons or organizations desiring to use this material for non-commercial purposes, MUST obtain the written consent of the contributor. Submitted by Valerie Crook, , March 1999 ************************************************************************** The History of West Virginia, Old and New Published 1923, The American Historical Society, Inc., Chicago and New York, Volume III, pg. 3-4 JOHNSON NEWLON CAMDEN. One of West Virginia's most eminent citizens, a business man, financier and public leader, was the late Johnson Newlon Camden. He was born in Lewis County March 6, 1828, and died at Parkersburg April 25, 1908, at the age of eighty years. He was the oldest son of John Scribner and Nancy (New- lon) Camden. In 1838, when he was ten years of age, the family moved to Braxton County, and he grew up there in the rural backwoods and became proficient in the arts and sports of that district, being a skilled hunter, fisher- man, and guiding a canoe with all the expertness of a native Indian. In this way he acquired his first practical knowledge of the mineral resources of the state, in which subsequently he played so prominent a part in the de- velopment. He made good use of limited opportunities to gain an education, and subsequently spent two years in an academy. He was deputy clerk of the Circuit Court of Braxton County under his uncle, Col. William Newlon, and at the age of eighteen was appointed a cadet in the West Point Military Academy, but resigned two years later to begin the study of law. He was admitted to the bar in 1851, and served as commonwealth attorney for Braxton County and later for Nicholas County. In a few years he gave up the practice of law to look after his growing interests acquired by the purchase of large tracts of wild land in Braxton and Nicholas counties. He established his home at Weston in 1853, and the following year was made assistant in a branch of the Exchange Bank of Virginia. Four years later he again resumed the practice of law and the work of developing his lands. He had made some experiments in the pro- duction of oil from cannel coal, but was soon diverted from this enterprise by hearing of the petroleum resources in Wood County. He began operating in that field when there was only one oil well, and soon had a company organized to drill and brought in a well that produced oil more rapidly than it could be stored or shipped. Much of the oil from this pioneer well was transported by flat- boats down the Little Kanawha River, and it is said that the first week's operations yielded the company $23,000. That was the beginning of a feverish oil boom in that section. The outbreak of the Civil war shortly afterward brought about a general suspension of work in the West Virginia oil fields, though Mr. Camden did not allow his interest to lapse. He and the Rathbone brothers developed some additional leases in the oil belt, and at the same time he became identified with others in providing a finan- cial organization to give more extended banking facilities, out of which the First National Bank of Parkersburg was formed. Mr. Camden became its first president. During subsequent years it is said that he owned an interest in every oil producing belt in West Virginia with one excep- tion. From oil production he and his associates in 1869 entered the refining branch of the industry, erecting large storage tanks and a refinery at Parkersburg. Soon after- ward the West Virginia fields began to decline, the great bulk of production being in Pennsylvania, and in order to secure crude oil for the refinery Mr. Camden became associated with the Standard Oil Company, then in its in- fancy. He became a director in the company and had charge of its West Virginia and Maryland combinations. The business at Parkersburg was continued under the name of the Camden Consolidated Oil Company, and the re- finery at times manufactured 300,000 barrels of oil yearly. Later the refining interests were removed to the seaboard, and Mr. Camden was responsible for the consolidation of the refineries at Baltimore under the Baltimore United Oil Company, a million dollar corporation of which he was president. Without doubt Senator Camden was one of the fore- most men in vision, executive planning and practical ad- ministration in developing the mining, manufacturing, com- mercial and agricultural interests of West Virginia. In 1882 he helped organize the Ohio River Railroad Company, which built the line from Wheeling to Huntington, now a part of the Baltimore & Ohio. He later organized and built a railroad from Fairmont to Clarksburg, opening a great coal field, and subsequently extended its facilities to important timber regions of the state. This was one of the first of an extensive system of narrow gauge railroads that furnished a network of transportation for the pro- ductive resources of the state. With Henry Gassaway Davis he was interested in the building of the West Vir- ginia Central Eailroad, now the Western Maryland. He was president of the Monongahela River and the West Virginia and Pittsburgh railroads, and at different times was identified with many of the financial and industrial corporations that have been powerful in West Virginia. The responsibilities and honors of politics and public affairs could hardly have been avoided by a man of such prominence. He was a leader in 1867 in the movement to remove the political disabilities from the citizens who had given their support to the Confederacy. In 1868 he was nominee of the conservative party for governor. While continuing his efforts to repeal the disfranchising clause of the State Constitution, he was equally open in his ad- vocacy of recent amendments to the Federal Constitution, and this stand prevented his nomination for governor by the democratic party in 1870. He was again nominated in 1872, but was defeated by a combination of democrats with the republicans who were seeking to defeat the new State Constitution. In 1880 he was almost unanimously nominated by the democratic caucus for the United States Senate, and was elected by the Legislature of that year. He was one of the able men in the Senate while the democratic party was ascendant in national affairs during the '80s. While he was not reelected, he was able to name his successor, and subsequently he was offered the nomination for governor, but declined. His last political honor came in 1893, when he was chosen to the United States Senate to fill the un- expired term of Senator Kenna, and he served from Janu- ary 28, 1893, to March 4, 1895. He was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1868, 1872 and 1876. Senator Camden in 1868 married Anna Thompson, daugh- ter of George W. and Elizabeth (Steenrod) Thompson, of Wheeling, where her father was a man of public promi- nence. Senator Camden and wife had two children. The son, Johnson Newlon Camden, is a prominent leader in agricultural and stock raising affairs in Central Kentucky, married into one of Kentucky's oldest and most distin- guished families, and recently served a brief term as a member of the United States Senate. The daughter of the late Senator Camden, Annie, became the wife of Gen. Baldwin Day Spilman.