Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 3.djvu/1267

Rh he has ever since been engaged in business. He is an influential citizen, has served five years in the city council, and as mayor of the city in 1877-78.

Lieutenant Orren Darius Stearnes, a native of Franklin county, who gave his life to the Confederate cause, was a descendant of the Puritans of England, the founder of his family in America having come over to Massachusetts with Governor Winthrop in 1630. His father, Lewis Patrick Stearnes, was born in Franklin county, Mass. Mr. Stearnes was a farmer by occupation, and took to wife Temperance Ward, daughter of a Virginia soldier of the Mexican war. He entered the Confederate service in 1861 as orderly-sergeant of Company D, Fifty-eighth regiment, Virginia infantry, and at the reorganization was elected lieutenant. He was with the forces under Stonewall Jackson in the valley in the spring of 1862, and after participating in the battle of McDowell, was taken with typhoid fever, from which he died soon afterward in hospital at Staunton. His son, Lewis P. Stearnes, born December 31, 1849, was too young for military service during the war, but in the untimely loss of his father, the sorrow of his mother, and the impoverishment caused by the war, experienced much of the trials and hardships of that period. Finding it necessary at the age of sixteen to seek a livelihood, he entered the railroad service at Dublin, Va., and a year later became agent and telegraph operator at Salem, Va. During the following twenty years he continued in railroad agency, telegraph and express work at Wytheville, Roanoke and Salem, Va., Macon, Ga., Christiansburg, Montgomery, White Sulphur Springs, Lambert's Point and Norfolk, Va., except the years 1882-84, when he was engaged in hotel management at Kanawha Falls, Huntington and Charleston, W. Va. While traveling as an express messenger between Macon and Atlanta, Ga., he was slightly injured in a collision on the night of January 1, 1873, in which eight persons were killed. On April 1, 1890, he resigned his position with the Norfolk & Western railroad at Norfolk to engage in handling all the coal shipped by the Chesapeake & Ohio railroad to Newport News. At this city he has taken an active interest in the development of the port, is vice-president of the Peninsular electric light and power company, and a director of the Citizens' and Marine bank. He is influential in political affairs, has served as a member of the State Democratic committee, and in 1893 he was appointed by President Cleveland collector of customs for the district of Newport News, Yorktown and Old Point Comfort, for a term of four years. Mr. Stearnes was married October 17, 1874, to Miss Bentley King, of Pulaski county, Va., and they have three children living.

Lieutenant-Colonel William H. Stewart, distinguished among the Confederate soldiers of Norfolk county, was born at Deep Creek, September 25, 1838, the grandson of Alexander Stewart, who died from exposure as a soldier of the war of 1812, and great-grandson of Charles Stewart, who was an officer of the Fifteenth Virginia and Eleventh Virginia regiments in the war of the Revolution. He was educated at the university of Virginia. In 1859 he became a lieutenant of the Wise Light Dragoons, and in that rank entered the active service of the State April 22, 1861, with his company, which after a few weeks' service in patrolling the