U.S. Data Repository http://www.us-data.org/ -- USGenNet Inc. -- Please read the U.S. Data Repository Copyright Statement on the following page: ------------------------------------------------------------------- Turner, Hugh ------------------------------------------------------------------- The History of Barbour County, West Virginia, From its Earliest Exploration and Settlement to the Present Time by Hu Maxwell The Acme Publishing Company, Morgantown, W.Va., 1899 Pages 482 and 485 Hugh Turner. This eccentric man, called "the Hermit" lived for the most of his life, and died in what is now Barbour County. The circumstances of his birth and early life are unknown. He was the first contractor to build the first court house in Randolph County, 1788; but he failed to fulfill his contract. He withdrew from the settlements and lived along Laurel Hill at several places in caves or in vaults made by building stone walls against the faces of cliffs. He was a Scotchman. He eked out a living by making millstones from the rock found along Laurel Hill suited to that purpose (Pottsville Conglomerate) and sold them to millers who built the first mills in Glade District. John G. Johnson says there are some of the unfinished millstone on Teter's Creek on Mrs. Catherine Poling's land. Some of his old camping places are nearby John Harris who died in 1882 in his ninety-third year remembered him, and said that Turner seldom came into the settlements, and could never be induced to lie in bed, always lying on the floor before the fire. He was called a "woman hater." He had a camp on the top of Laurel Hill on the old road which led from Belington by way of Beaver Creek to Beverly. The camp was ten or twelve feet square, built of stones beside a cliff, and the ruins may still be seen. About 1860 Lewis Corley (who in 1898 hung himself at the Poor Farm in this county) found a copper rule one foot long, with inches and fractions marked on it, and some mason's tools, in a crevice of a cliff. The tools were probably his. The old man was found dead by some persons going from Glady Creek to court at Beverly. He had a fire near the roadside, and it was supposed that he had fainted and fallen into the fire. He had rolled into the road. Some of his millstones were near the place in recent years. Others had been rolled down the steep eastern face of Laurel Hill (toward Leading Creek) and they acquired such force that they knocked down trees. ------------------------------------------------------------------- If you've reached this file through a SEARCH, you can access other biographies for Barbour County, WV by going to the following URL: http://www.us-data.org/wv/barbour/bios.html -------------------------------------------------------------------