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Chester Hubbard

Congressman, businessman, and state founder Chester Dorman Hubbard (November 14, 1814-August 23, 1891) was born in Connecticut, with New England roots dating back to 1621. He moved to Wheeling with his father’s family as a child. He was educated in the Wheeling schools and at Wesleyan University of Connecticut, graduating as valedictorian of the class of 1840. He married Sarah Pallister in 1842.

After college Chester Hubbard entered his father’s lumber mill business and later helped develop Wheeling as an iron and steel manufacturing center. He was president of the German Bank of Wheeling, of the Pittsburgh, Wheeling & Kentucky Railroad, and of C. D. Hubbard and Company, with other enterprises in iron, tin, nails, and other businesses.

Hubbard served in the Virginia legislature (1851–52) and in 1861 vigorously opposed secession as a delegate to Virginia’s secession convention. His intention was ‘‘to show those traitors at Richmond . . . that we are not to be transferred like the cattle on the hills or the slaves on their plantations, without our knowledge or consent,’’ Hubbard wrote at the time. He was elected a colonel of volunteers upon his return to Wheeling. Hubbard was a member of the First and Second Wheeling Conventions, which established the loyal Reorganized Government of Virginia and opened the way to West Virginia statehood. He was a member of the first state Senate (1863–64) and later served two terms (1865–69) in the U.S. House of Representatives. As a young man, he served on Wheeling’s city council.

Chester Hubbard died in Wheeling, and is buried in Greenwood Cemetery.