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Peirpoint, Francis Perry (1840-1869)
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History of Ritchie County
by Minnie Kendall Lowther
Wheeling News Litho. Co., Wheeling W.Va., 1911

Pages 620-621

GENERAL FRANCIS PERRY PEIRPOINT was one of the first young men of
Ritchie county to inscribe his name in the history of West
Virginia.

Born a student, and ever diligent, his career, though so very
brief, was one of the most distinguished in the history of the
county, for one of his years. Beginning as an office boy in the
employ of the County and Circuit clerks of this and Pleasants
county, he rapidly forged his way to the front. He studied law and
was admitted to the bar at a very early age: and in 1862, when a
call was made for volunteers, he went to Wheeling, where he
recruited the Twelfth Virginia Infantry from the counties of the
Northern Panhandle, of the state, and entered the regiment as an
adjutant. He was promoted to the rank of Major, a little later, and
was proffered the Colonelcy, but declined in favor of a brother
officer. He was called from the field of action, shortly after the
birth of our new Commonwealth, by the appointment to the office of
Adjutant-General of the State, by Governor A. I. Boreman; and he it
was who prepared the Adjutant-General's Report of the Soldiers of
the Civil war — a report which has been so invaluable to these
veterans for reference in obtaining their pensions from the
government.

His services here being at an end, he entered Harvard University
and was graduated in law, he having taken the course a year sooner
than was required by putting in all his time, even the vacation
season. He then returned home and began the practice of his
profession, at Harrisville; but ill health had already begun to
prey upon him, and in November, 1868, with a Wheeling family by the
name of Hornbrook, he started to Florida in quest of health, but by
the time they had reached New Orleans (on January 1, 1869), the sun
of his young life was hanging low in the Western horizon, and on
the seventh of that same month it sank to rise no more. And thus
his promising career was brought to a close before he had reached
his twenty-ninth birthday; for he was born on February 23, 1840.
Young, handsome, and talented, he was universally admired, and his
untimely end was widely deplored.

The remains were brought back to Harrisville, and tenderly laid
away in the cemetery south of town, amid the scenes of his happy
childhood.

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