MCGINNIS
Submitted by Mike McGinnis mdmcginnis@juno.com

The Rev. David Allen McGinnis was born in Guyandotte, WV, on the Ohio and Guyandotte rivers,
on October 1, 1822. When Cabell County, Virginia, was formed in 1809, Guyandotte was its largest
community. The town was officially incorporated one year later. One hundred years later Guyandotte
was absorbed into Huntington, West Virginia in 1911.

As a boy, David Allen worked on his father's farm and in his father's store. A lover of books,
he studied at Marshall College, WV and became a schoolteacher in Wayne County, WV, before he had
left his teens. His teaching career in Wayne and Ritchie Counties lasted 17 terms. 
(An early journal records his disappointment at having to "whip twenty of my scholars" one
day.) The 1850 Fayette County WV Census lists his occupation as "Devine." He settled in Ritchie
County in 1852, and established a home at a farm on the headwaters of the North Fork of the
Hughes River in 1852. After Sarah died in November 1876, David married Nancy Hammett. He died on
Sunday, May 17, 1896. His tombstone, in an unnamed cemetery in Mountain WV just off Route 74,
reads, "Kind father of love thou hast come to thy rest/Forever to bask mid the joys of the
blest." 

David Allen joined the Methodist Church at 13. On his twentieth birthday he wrote that he would
be pleased if the next twenty years could be spent in service to God. Two years later, on August
17, 1844, he was licensed to preach . He served as an itinerant circuit rider in Fayette and
Raleigh counties, traveling hundreds of miles to preach in settlements as far away as Kentucky
that had no ordained ministers. According to tradition, his uncle Pyrrhus McGinnis invited him
to preach in Beckley, east Raleigh County. From the 1840's until at least the 1860's, he kept a
journal which in 1975 was still in a cupboard at his home in Mountain WV, later owned by his
descendants the McCullough and Perkins families. After seven years, health problems forced him to
take an office assignment with the West Virginia Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal
Church, though the 1880 Census lists him as a farmer. He was the first pastor of Mole Hill
Methodist Church, now a Union(nondenominational) church.

On Feb. 22, 1886 David Allen McGinnis wrote to his daughter Samantha: "With pleasure I write to
you to inform you that I am in my usual health. I have been by myself 4 months. Melcena has come
home. I am attending church. We had a good meeting last night. I am serving God and trying to
get to heaven. I want to be ready for death every day. Pray for me and all my children that we
may all get to that good world where there will be no more parting. My love to you & Mr. Young
& all the children.D.A. McGinnis" The History of Ritchie County called him "a man of pronounced
views and of a deeply religious character, and the influence of this character has left its
impress upon his descendants, who ever stand for something in the communities where they reside."
His journal entries frequently end with "I think I have grown in grace today," or mention his
enjoyment of God's presence that day. His grandson Herbert P. McGinnis reported in 1956,
"Everybody says he was the finest man they ever met."