Thayer Melvin

At the start of the American Civil War, Melvin enlisted as a private in Company F of the 1st West Virginia Volunteer Infantry Regiment of the Union Army.[1][2] He commenced his studies in jurisprudence at the age of 17 in New Manchester, which was then the county seat of Hancock, and received his law books and instruction from the town's lawyers.[8] In 1855, Melvin was elected as the Commonwealth's attorney of Hancock County, despite the fact that he was under the required minimum age of 21 to hold public office.[15] Melvin served as an adjutant and chief of staff to Kelley while he was in command of the garrison guarding the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in Cumberland, Maryland, which was then the headquarters of the Department of West Virginia military district.[18][19] In the early morning of February 21, 1865, the Confederate partisans known as McNeill's Rangers sent two detachments behind enemy lines to capture Kelley and his superior Major General Crook from their hotels in Cumberland.[26] On January 1, 1867, Melvin began his one-year tenure as attorney general; he was renominated on June 4, 1868, at the West Virginia Republican Convention and reelected to the position in fall 1868.[1][2][27] Melvin resigned his post as attorney general to accept an appointment to a circuit judgeship of the First Judicial District of West Virginia which comprised Brooke, Hancock, Marshall, and Ohio counties.[1][2][29] He had been appointed to the judgeship by West Virginia Governor William E. Stevenson to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Elbert H.[2][30][31] While serving as a circuit judge, Melvin was appointed by the governor to assist in completing the codification of West Virginia state laws.[32][36][37] In 1873, Melvin refused to transfer the case of Taylor Strauder, a black man, to a federal court following his indictment by an all-white Ohio County grand jury for the murder of his wife.[38] Following Melvin's ruling, Strauder's murder trial proceeded in the Ohio County court in May 1873, and he was inevitably convicted by an all-white jury.[42] In 1898, Melvin and his law partner, Riley, argued on behalf of the West Virginia Board of Public Works before the U.S. Supreme Court in the case, Pittsburgh &c. Ry.[3] Melvin was interred next to his father and mother in his family's graveyard at United Methodist Cemetery in his hometown of Fairview (present-day New Manchester) in Hancock County.[53] Following his death, lawyer Frank W. Nesbitt was appointed by Governor William M. O. Dawson to fulfill his unexpired term on the circuit court bench."[1] In his Bench and Bar of West Virginia (1919), former Governor George W. Atkinson remarked of Melvin's judicial career: "He sought only to be just and fair, and rarely if ever, failed in deciding right.[65] In addition, Melvin belonged to the Holliday Post of the Grand Army of the Republic and participated in the decoration of local Union graves on Memorial Day in 1897, 1898, and 1899.