Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 3.djvu/789

Rh Blair of Hampden-Sidney college, was also in the military service of the Confederate States.

Lisle A. Blamire, of Norfolk, a son of a gallant Confederate soldier, was born at Norfolk, March 3, 1870. His grandfather, Edward T. Blamire, served as a captain in the Mexican war and held the same rank in the State militia. His father, Edward T. Blamire, a native of Portsmouth, Va., entered the Confederate service in 1861 with the Old Dominion Guard, a famous company organized at Portsmouth in 1856, which was ordered into active service April 20, 1861, and in the following June became Company K of the Ninth Virginia regiment of infantry. In the operations of this regiment he participated until the last two years of the war, when he was assigned to the engineer corps, where he served until the surrender. At one time falling into the hands of the enemy, he experienced the deprivations and suffering of a prisoner of war at Point Lookout. His death occurred November 26, 1896. Lisle Blamire was reared at Norfolk and educated in the school of Christian Brothers and St. John's military academy of Alexandria, leaving his studies at the age of seventeen to take a place as clerk in his father's dry-goods establishment. Two years later he accepted a clerkship with the Norfolk & Southern railroad company, where he remained one year, and then was for six years connected with the freight department of the Norfolk & Carolina railroad. Then, after a few months with the railroad company he had first served, he formed a partnership with his brother, James B. Blamire, in the tea and coffee trade, doing business under the titles of Blamire Brothers, and the Imperial tea and coffee company.

Major George Booker and family: Major George Booker, of Elizabeth City county, paymaster, in 1861, of the army of the Peninsula under General Magruder, was born at Sherwood, the old family estate on the Back river, in Elizabeth City county, October 5, 1805. He was the son of Richard Booker, born in 1778 at Sherwood, where he lived the life of a prosperous planter, serving as magistrate and going out with the Virginia troops to take part in the war of 1812. He married Elizabeth Slaughter and died in 1823. The father of Richard was George Booker, born in Amelia county in 1723, who came to Elizabeth City county in his eighteenth year, served twenty years in the legislature, was a neighbor and friend of Chancellor Wythe and prominent as a lawyer and politician, fought in the Revolutionary war, and enjoyed the intimate personal friendship of General Washington. He died at the age of ninety years, as the result of accident. His father bore the name of Richard. The ancestral line is traced back to a family of prominent London merchants. Major Booker was reared at the ancestral home—which had first been granted to the Purifey family by George III, and thence passed through the hands of the Marshalls to the Bookers about two centuries ago. He was educated at William and Mary college, studied law and was admitted to the bar but never practiced, devoting instead his attention wholly to his estate, which was valued in 1860 at over $160,000, aside from the fifty slaves. Before his twenty-first birthday he sat in the legislature, and served several terms afterward. He represented his district in all the national Democratic conventions up to the one held at Charleston, was very influential in political affairs, and was intimately acquainted with Webster, Clay, Calhoun, and other conspicuous men of that period.