Preston County, West Virginia Biography of Leroy S. BUCKLEW 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, pages 223-224 LEROY S. BUCKLEW In 1812 William Bucklew, a native of New Jersey, established his home in Preston County, in the Whetsell settlement southeast of Kingwood. A hundred and ten years have passed, and in all these years the Bucklew family, acknowledging William Bucklew as their pioneer West Virginia ancestor, have been actively and usefully distributed in the county, carrying on their work as agriculturists, in the mechanical trades, some in the professions, and maintaining high standards of civic usefulness and honor. One of his descendants is Leroy S. Bucklew of Kingwood, well known as a substantial business man, and a man of exceptional gifts and cultivated tastes, who has used his means and time for extensive study in scientific research and the collection of data and material that illustrate the history of the earth and the races of mankind therein. William Bucklew was of Scotch-Irish origin, and there was a family of the same strain in England who spelled the name Buccleuch. William Bucklew on leaving New Jersey went to Selbysport, Maryland, and from there came to Preston County and bought land from the Butlers. The deed of the transaction bears the date of the year in which the second war with Great Britain was started. He cleared up his land and was an industrious cultivator thereof until his death, in 1844. He married Mary A. Michael, at Selbysport, Maryland. Twelve children were born to this pioneer couple. William, born in 1793, spent his life on the farm in the Union Schoolhouse settlement and died in 1885; Jonas, who in a measure filled his father's place as a farmer and lived on Briery Mountain; James, born in 1800, lived on Three Forks in Preston County, where he is buried; Philip, who in addition to the family vocation of farming conducted with his sons a grist mill on Elza Run and is buried on Briery Mountain; Sarah, who became the wife of George Funk, and they lived above Rowlesburg, where she died; Andrew, noted in the succeeding paragraphs; Jonathan, who was a farmer in the Whetsell community; Elizabeth, who became the wife of a Mr. Postlethwaite and lived in Wetzel County; Anna, who was married to William Moore and lived near her sister Elizabeth; and John, born in 1809, lived on Briery Mountain. Sarah lived on the homestead until her mother died. Andrew Bucklew was born probably in the same year as his brother James, in 1800, and spent his life on a farm at Union Schoolhouse, where he died in 1845, at the age of forty-five. By his first wife, Martha Hardesty, he had ho children. His second wife was Susan Jackson, and she was the mother of Jonas, born in 1823 and died in 1893; Philip, who spent his life in Preston County and died about 1892; Jehu H.; Harriet, born in 1830 and died in 1873 as the wife of Martin Ridenour. Jehu H. Bucklew, representing the third generation of the family in Preston County, was born in 1829 and died in1888. He acquired a liberal education and had some of the versatile faculties that distinguished his son Leroy. He taught school as a young man, and when he settled down he worked at his trade as a blacksmith and carpenter. He also studied medicine, and became very skilled in the concoction of herbal medicines, and applied his remedies with much success. He sought an opportunity to serve the Union at the time of the Civil war, but was rejected for physical reasons. He hegan voting as a whig, and from that party became a strong republican, and was also an enthusiastic Methodist. The wife of John H. Bucklew was Epaline Ridenour, daughter of Martin Ridenour. She died in 1872, the mother of the following children: James B. was born in 1849, a resident of Kingwood. He married first Rachel Rhodes, who died leaving four children: Annie, deceased; Joseph T., of Cumberland, Maryland; Elizabeth, deceased; and Virginia, living on Briery Mountain. He married for his second wife, Keturah Goff, of Rowlesburg, and they have children as follows: Charles, Elmer H. and A. C. Sevilla C. married for her first husband David Uppole, for her second, W. G. Garner, and she is now the wife of James S. Myers. Mary M. married William M. Wilburn and died in Tucker County. Henry C. is a railroad man with home at Whitaker, Pennsylvania. He married Mary Rowley. Leroy S. is mentioned below. Letitia became the wife of Grant White-hair and died in Kingwood. Leroy S. Bucklew was born April 23, 1861, on the home farm on Briery Mountain, where he was reared. He had the routine discipline of the schools for a few terms, but his real education he has gained by the study of books and nature and has always embarked enthusiastically in the quest of knowledge. He early showed a taste for mechanics, learned the trade of blacksmith from his father, and also acquired skill with woodworking tools. Among other gifts his father was a musician, one of the old-time fiddlers. Leroy learned to play his father's violin, and achieved some virtuosity with that instrument. He played the violin as a source of financial gain, and he taught violin music in Kingwood for some years as a side issue. For many years he was a cornetist in the Kingwood Brass Band, having joined the organization some thirty years ago, when he first came to the city. As a collector of rare articles of various kinds he has accumulated several violins, one of them a real Stradivarius, which came from Europe and was once the property of the Royse Family, a member of which was the first man buried in the Kingwood Cemetery. That burial occurred in 1814. On removing to Kingwood Leroy Bucklew for several years followed his trade as a journeyman carpenter. He made a study of the mechanics of building and architecture, and finally took up contracting, hiring some of the men who in former years had hired him. Mr. Bucklew built the Doctor Rudasill home for Mr. Parks, one of the splendidly finished and expensive homes of the town, the Henry Flyth home, the John Ford residence, and the H. T. Lincoln bungalow, doing the work on this house with his own hands. These and many other structures in and around Kingwood testify to his skill as a builder. For several years be was also in the business of handling slate roofing, and he did much work of installing slate blackboards in schoolrooms. Mr. Bucklew has never married, though from a safe distance he admires the happiness and perfect beauty of congenial matrimony and domestic companionship. This freedom from home cares has enabled him to follow his strong bent as a nature student. For a number of years it has been his habit to spend his Sunday afternoons strolling over the hills of Preston County, looking for something new to himself and gathering specimens for his collections. Some professional scientists have been glad to claim acquaintance with Mr. Bucklew, and he is undoubtedly the supreme authority in his locality on birds, flowers, rocks and the processes of nature in general. His interest is not altogether absorbed in geology, botany and ornithology, but in anthropology as well, and in his home he has a rare and interesting collection of tools, implements, furniture and useful and ornamental objects associated with the changing tastes and habits of mankind. His collection includes firearms, old furniture, old pieces of art. He has an old time spinning wheel, copies of old American newspapers running back seventy or eighty years, and one copy of a London newspaper of 1788 printed on the fine durable print paper of that time. His cabinets contain a rich exhibit of the instruments of warfare, including those used by the aboriginal tribes of America. The stone bludgeon, tomahawk and flint tipped and French steel-pointed arrows; the battle ax of the middle ages in Europe; and also an array of fire arms that practically illustrate all the processes in their development from the introduction of gunpowder from China. These firearms include the Chinese match-lock rifle, then the guns of the flint lock period, including the pill-lock, the fuse-lock and the old Revolutionary flint-lock; variations of the pistol grip and the gun-stock blunderbusses; then the breech- loading rifles of the Civil war time and, finally, several types of the improved models of army rifles. Hanging from some of these pieces are the accoutrements used in firing and clean-ing them and in making ammunition for them. His collection of pistols ranges from the gaping horse pistol along the line through the pepper box, derringer, pocket pistol, Colt's revolver and the modern army revolver used in the World war. He has two war drums from India, one a wooden and the other a clay drum, both with heads and lacings intact but out of use forever save as an object lesson for those interested in the age-long warfare among the individuals and races of mankind. Another exhibit illustrates the development of methods of illumination, beginning with the flint, steel and punk, the old tallow candle, the oil lamp fed with hog lard, and finally the kerosene lamp. There is an old "turnkey," an instrument used by our forefathers for pulling teeth before forceps were invented; also a perfect specimen of the "hackle" upon which the flax was partly prepared for the spinning wheel. He has an old money belt once worn by John Rowley, a Pennsylvania forty-niner California bound. A little sack he wore in his childhood days, made by his mother, is especially treasured by Mr. Bucklew. His geological collection contains specimens from all over America and some from afar, and fills several shelves of a cabinet. His collection of coins and money tokens of the world contains some rare pieces of gold and silver money, besides the different denominations of American paper money and some of foreign countries. Among old books he has a reader and speller used by an earlier generation of American school children, and also a Bible that was one of the early publications of the English translation. Mr. Bucklew since youth has given a strong allegiance to the republican party, but office holding is a matter foreign to his taste and his only service that can be regarded in the nature of a public duty has been in his Sunday School. Some years ago Mr. Bucklew learned to appreciate the great truths of Christianity, and has since been one of the enthusiastic Sunday school and church workers. He is identified with the Methodist congregation. He wears a twenty-five year jewel of the Knights of Pythias and is regular in his attendance of this lodge as of his church. He has taken three degrees in Masonry. Mr. Bucklew is a stockholder in the Kingwood National Bank. During the World war he invested in bonds and stamps, and he made all the Red Cross boxes in which goods were shipped from Kingwood to France. Throughout that period he busied himself with some useful service that would help the Government to win the war.