The following events happened on these dates in West Virginia history. To read more, go toe-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia at www.wvencyclopedia.org.
June 7, 1899: Congresswoman Elizabeth Kee was born in Radford, Virginia. She became West Virginia’s first female member of Congress in 1951.
June 7, 1926: An explosion at a sand mining operation in Morgan County killed six men. Their deaths were the inspiration for the ballad “The Miner’s Doom.”
June 8, 1893: Entrepreneur Donald F. Duncan was born in Ohio but grew up in Huntington. Duncan founded the Duncan Yo-Yo Company and the Duncan Parking Meter Corporation.
June 9, 1927: Karl Dewey Myers was named the state’s first poet laureate by Governor Howard Mason Gore. Myers held the post for 10 years.
June 9, 1957: T. D. Jakes was born in South Charleston. As a boy, he preached to imaginary congregations and carried a Bible to school, which earned him the nickname “Bible Boy.” He is the senior pastor at the Potter’s House, a nondenominational church in Dallas, Texas.
June 10, 1775: The Berkeley County Riflemen were organized by Capt. Hugh Stephenson of Shepherdstown, in response to a call for Revolutionary War soldiers by Gen. George Washington.
June 10, 1921: Labor leader Daniel Vincent Maroney was born on Cabin Creek, Kanawha County. Maroney served as the international president of the Amalgamated Transit Union from 1973 to 1981.
June 11, 1866: Architect Elmer Forrest Jacobs was born in Preston County. His work can be seen particularly in downtown Morgantown, in residential South Park, and on the West Virginia University campus. Most of his Morgantown buildings are now listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
June 12, 2006: Robert C. Byrd became the longest-serving United States senator in history. He served in the Senate from 1959 until his death in 2010. His record was broken in 2013 by Congressman John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, although Byrd retains the Senate record.
June 13, 1861: The Second Wheeling Convention began in the federal courtroom of the Wheeling Custom House. This convention declared the Confederate state government in Richmond illegal; created a Reorganized Government of Virginia loyal to the United States; elected Francis Pierpont governor of Virginia; and called for the western counties to be formed into a new state.
June 13, 1928: Mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. was born in Bluefield. In 1994, Nash was honored with the Nobel Prize in Economics. He was the subject of a best-selling biography, A Beautiful Mind, which was later made into a movie.
