Nicholas County, West Virginia Biography of Oscar Lee STANARD ************************************************************************** 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 Joan Wyatt, , March 2000 ************************************************************************** History of West Virginia Old and New Published 1923, The American Historical Society, Inc. Chicago and New York, Volume 111 Page 373 Oscar Lee Stanard- Nicholas Co. Oscar Lee Stanard is one of the fortunate men of his time. President of the O.L. Stanard Dry Goods Company, a Huntington wholesale house, and head of a large number of retail stores, his business success has been on a substantial plane for a number of years. But his good fortune is not solely on the score of commercial achievement. He has the kindly attitude of a man of affairs and an unselfish interest and leadership in objects and movements outside the scope of his driving business power. More over, he has the heritage of Old Virginia families of the greatest social and historical prominence of the greatest social and historical prominence. While the reader may first be gratified with a brief account of his individual career, it will also be appropriate to add, consistent with space permitted, some notes on his ancestry and some of the charming personalities in both the direct and collateral branches of his family. Mr. Stanard was born at Enon in Nicholas Co., West Virginia, February 13, 1878. He acquired a good education attending public schools and the Summerville Normal School, and began his career as a school teacher in the winter of 1897-98. In the following spring he went to work in the store of his uncle, J.D. Carden, at Clay, West Virginia, and the next step in his rapid ascent of the commercial ladder was as traveling salesman for the wholesale dry goods house of Abney- Barnes Company of Charleston. He began with that firm in 1900, and after a short experience was ranked as one of the largest individual contributors to the annual volume of business of the firm. He becomes a stockholder in the company and also went into partnership with individuals establishing a string of retail stores that would add to the permanent value of the wholesale house. For several years he was secretary-treasurer of the Abney-Barnes Company. In the latter part of 1913 Mr. Stanard moved to Huntington. He established here the Coft-Stanard Company, of which he is still director and stockholder. Several years later he founded the O.L. Stanard Dry Goods Company as a wholesale dry goods and merchant house, and in four years that business grew from a volume of $500,000 to more than $1,500.000, and it now does an annual business of over $1,500,000. Mr. Stanard is president of this company, and he is financially interested and is president of some thirty odd retail stores located in West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio, with an annual business of four and one-half million dollars. He is also a director and the first vice president of the Hunt Bank & Trust Company. An interested associate and a sharer in his business success and his career has been Mrs. Stanard. Her maiden name was Mary Marjorie Odgen, daughter of Hon. Howard N. Ogden, of Fairmont. Mr. and Mrs. Stanard were married June 18, 1912. Their children are Ella Jean and Shirley Josephine Stanard. Mr. Stanard has served as director of the Huntington Chamber of Commerce, is a member of the Rotary Club, the Arkwright Club of New York, the Country Club at Huntington, and is a Royal Arch Knights Templar and Thirty-second degree Scottish Rite Mason. He is a member of the Missionary Baptist Church. His business affairs have engrossed his attention to the exclusion of politics, but he was elected by his party as delegate to the National Democratic Convention in San Francisco, June, 1920. Mr. Stanard is still a comparatively young man, has won success with many years of activity still in promise, and he has been exceedingly generous in his association with still younger men and has helped a number to get a real start. One of the early principals of his life's conduct, faithfully adhered to, was the habit of systematic giving, and he practiced it when his income was modest and has kept it up on a proportional scale in the years of his affluence. Mr. Stanard represents the eighth generation of this family, beginning with his first American ancestor. Long before the family came to America it was well known in Norfolk and other sections of England. The earlier form of spelling was Stannard. Many members of the old English family were the followers of such skilled trades as weaving, painting and gliding, and the artistic parents came to fine flower in such notable artists as Joseph Stanard (1796-1830), Alfred Stanard (1806-1889) and others. The first settler of the family in Virginia was William Stanard, who was a prominent citizen of Middlesex County during the latter part of the seventeenth century. About 1677 he married Eltonhead Conway, widow of Henry Thacker and daughter of Edwin Conway, of Lancaster County, representing a family of high rank. She was the niece of the wives of three Council members, and also of the wife of Governor Sir Henry Chicheley. William Stanard was a vestryman of Christ Church Parish. He and his wife, Eltonhead, had three children. The youngest of them, named William, was born February 16, 1682, and died in 1732. For seventeen years prior to his death he was clerk of Middlesex County, and, like his father, was a vestryman in Christ Church parish. His first wife was Anne Hazelwood, who left him a daughter, Ann. In 1717, he married Elizabeth Beverly, daughter of Capt. Harry Beverly and maternal granddaughter of Maj. Gen. Robert Smith. Her paternal grandfather, Robert Beverly, came to the colonies in the seventeenth century. The Beverly family was one of much prominence in that section of Virginia. The only son of William and Elizabeth Stanard was named Beverly, and that name became increasingly popular in this family. The Stanard family was well to do, and the home was comfortably furnished, statements that were attested by some of the inventories of household property found in the wills of that generation. Beverly Stanard, representing the third generation, inherited most of his mother's property. He was twenty-six years of age when he died. He had already served as justice and sheriff of Middlesex County, and in 1750 he moved to Spottsylvania County. His residence at Roxbury in that county was one of the first built, and is still standing. His estate of about 16,000 acres passed out of the possession of his descendants about twenty years ago. The wife of Beverly Stanard was Elizabeth Chew, daughter of Larkin Chew. Beverly Stanard died in 1765, and his tombstone still stands at Roxbury. Of his two sons and one daughter the older son was named William, and he was the direct ancestor of the Huntington businessman. William and his brother Larkin were soldiers in the war of the Revolution, William with the rank of captain. Both brothers became prominent in local politics, William serving as sheriff of Spottsylvania County in 1882-84. The name Roxbury was changed to Stanardsville in his honor, and is now the county seat of Greene County. Both William and Larkin Sranard had sons named Beverly, and the two cousins married daughters of Judge William Fleming. These marriages connected the Stanards with some of the distinguished Colonial families of Virginia. The Flemings were lineal descendants from Sir John Fleming, first Earl of Wigton, Scotland. A great-grandson of Sir John was Col. John Fleming, who married Mary Bolling, great-granddaughter of John Rolfe and the famous Indian maiden Pocahontas. The Stard- Fleming branch of the family has produced many conspicuous members, including the great Virginia jurist, Judge Robert Stanard, who married the Virginia beauty, Jane Craig, who was the inspiration for some of Edgar Allen Poe's poems. Judge Robert Standard had one of the most beautiful homes in the old City of Richmond. However, the direct line of descent to O.L. Stanard from William Stanard of Stanardsville is not through the son Beverly, but through the son William Jr. This William married Elizabeth Branch, of Powhatan County. He was the fourth Stanard in direct succession to take a bride of the name Elizabeth. This couple were the parents of seven children, all of whom reached mature years and married, their alliances being made with such notable families as Taliaferro, Hume, Taylor, Woolfork, Eddins and LeBarrow. The third child in this generation was Lawrence Stanford, grandfather of the Huntington merchant. Lawrence Stanard was born at Stanardsville, Spottsylvania County, Virginia, and was the first of his line to move out of the old state. In 1830 he settled at Enon, Nicholas County, West Virginia, where he developed extensive agricultural interests. He married Mary E. Taylor, of Charleston. South Carolina. Lawrence Stanard died at Enon in 1890, and his wife, in the same place in 1907. Their oldest son was William Taylor Stanard, who followed in his father's footsteps, became the owner of a farm at Enon, and was prominent in the agricultural circles of that section of West Virginia. William Taylor Stanard, father of O.L. Stanard married Mary Ella Carden, and thus became allied with another family of distinction. She was of Virginian and English ancestry, and her father, David R. Carden, was a farmer of Buckingham County, Virginia, but died at Enon in West Virginia in 1864. The Carden family is an old English name, represented primarily in Cheshire County and also in County Kent, and after about 1650 in County Tipperary, Ireland. The Irish family of Cardens have been of the landed gentry of that country for over two centuries, and a number of their distinctions rest upon services as soldiers, diplomats and other high positions.