Samuel Lewis Hays

This marker honors Samuel Lewis Hays, the man who essentially built Glenville. Born near Clarksburg in seventeen ninety-four, he moved into this rugged country in eighteen thirty-three to farm. He laid out the town of Glenville in eighteen forty-five and was instrumental in carving out Gilmer County that same year.

Hays also went to Washington, serving in Congress as a Democrat in the early eighteen forties. His most lasting act came in eighteen forty-two, when as a congressman he appointed a young man from the area named Thomas Jonathan Jackson to West Point. That cadet would become famous as Stonewall Jackson, one of the Confederacy's most celebrated generals. Hays later helped urge the building of the turnpike linking Parkersburg and Staunton. He died in eighteen seventy-one, his fingerprints all over this corner of West Virginia.