SUMMERS COUNTY W.Va. (Hinton News) – This week’s piece has a strong personal family connection with it. Over the years I have been called the family history keeper, curator, historian, and even the family junk hoarder. Whichever it is, I will wear it with great pride.
I recently purchased this antique framed photo from my Great Uncle Buck Thompson’s estate auction. The lady in the photo is Frances Virginia “Fanny” Smith Meadows. She was born on May 27, 1843, died on February 19, 1903, and is buried at Mount Pisgah United Methodist Church in Hilldale, Summers County.
This lady is my fourth great-grandmother. I started doing some genealogy research on her and found/remembered her husband was Lewis B. Meadows. It got me thinking, I had some old documents buried in my collection with that name.
I uncovered 25 tax receipts for Summers County from 1877 through 1901. My third cousin on the Thompson side came from Ohio to visit my grandfather in roughly 2014 as he did every year. Knowing how big of a “history nut,” (he always called me that, haha) I am, he brought these tax tickets and a few early Thompson photographs to me.
One was the Civil War Memorial dedication in Forest Hill which I did a story on a while back. You see, Linville Wallace or “Wilkie” as we all called him, was my grandfather Bernard Thompson’s first cousin.
His mother Nora Wallace was L.W. Thompson (who has been featured in a number of my stories) and Deliah “Meadows” Thompson’s daughter. Deliah was one of Lewis and Frances’s daughters. These historic documents had been handed down the line until Wilkie gave them to me.
Chances are most people have never seen a Summers County document from 1877 before. This was only six years after the county was formed from segments of Fayette, Greenbrier, Mercer and Monroe counties.
The new county was named for George W. Summers who lived from 1804 to 1868. He was a well-known legislator and thought of as one of West Virginia’s founders. Looking at the 1878 tax ticket I started wondering what the taxes of $9.07 would be in today’s dollars. With inflation that would come to $286.33 as of November 28, 2024.
