Biography of Hon. Edward Cooper

HON. EDWARD COOPER, who represented the Fifth West
Virginia District in Congress throughout the period of the
World war, is a lawyer by training and early profession,
but for over twenty years has devoted his time and ener-
gies to the business of coal operator, and is one of the best
known in the Pocahontas field in Mercer County. His home
is in the Town of Bramwell, located on the branch of the
Norfolk & Western Railroad, near Bluestone Junction.

Mr. Cooper was born February 26, 1873, at Treverton,
Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, son of John and
Maria (Padbury) Cooper. His parents were both born in
England, and immediately after their marriage came to
the United States, about 1863, during the Civil war times,
and lived for a number of years in Pennsylvania. John
Cooper had been foreman in coal mines in England, and he
resumed the same work in this country. He was born in
1838. He was a regular miner in Pennsylvania, but was
soon promoted to foreman. In 1872 he removed to West
Virginia and began opening mines in the New River coal
fields along the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad, first at Quine-
mont and later at Cooper, near Bramwell. Here he devel-
oped the first Pocahontas coal mines in West Virginia,
and the first Pocahontas coal shipped from a West Virginia
operation was mined and shipped by John Cooper. He was
one of the successful coal operators of his time, and was
also president of the Bank of Bramwell when he died in
1898. He was active in the cause of the republican party
as a layman, and was one of the first masters of the Ma-
sonic Lodge at Bramwell and had attained the thirty-third
supreme honorary, degree in Scottish Rite Masonry.

Edward Cooper was the second son in a family of six
children, and has spent practically all his life in Mercer
County. He attended a private school at Pocahontas, Vir-
ginia, for three years, and then entered Washington and
Lee University, where he took three years in the academic
course and spent two years in the law department, gradu-
ating in law in 1893. Mr. Cooper actively practiced at
Bramwell for two or three years, but in 1898, at the death
of his father, gave up his profession and took charge, along
with his brother, Thomas H. Cooper, now deceased, of the
coal properties at Cooper. His interests as an operator
have become widely extended, and he has been a director
in some of the most prominent mining corporations in the
Pocahontas field, including Mill Creek, Coaldale, McDowell,
Crystal, the Pocahontas Consolidated Company and the
Flat Top Fuel Company.

Mr. Cooper for a number of years has been a leader in
the republican party in his section of the state. He was a
delegate to the Chicago National Convention in 1912, where
he supported the nomination of Mr. Roosevelt. In 1914 he
was elected a member of the Sixty-fourth Congress, and
re-elected in 1918. As a business man of wide experience,
a successful coal operator, he was able to do a great deal
of valuable work for the Government while in Congress,
and during the period of the war.

On October 5, 1895, Mr. Cooper married Frances Doug-
lass Smith, of Lexington, Virginia, daughter of James R.
and Fannie (Douglass) Smith. Mr. and Mrs. Cooper have
two children, Edward, Jr., born October 19, 1897, and
Frances Douglass, born October 5, 1902. Edward, Jr., vol-
unteered in the Marine Corps at the declaration of war
against Germany, and having been trained in the Culver
Military Academy of Indiana he was at once made a drill
sergeant, and was assigned to duty throughout the war
period at Paris Island, South Carolina.

Mr. Cooper and family are Presbyterians. He is a Royal
Arch and Knight Templar Mason and Shriner, a member
of the Elks and the Moose, and belongs to the Shenandoah
Club of Roanoke, Virginia, the Bluefield Country Club,
Mercer County Country Club and the Falls Mills Hunting
and Fishing Club, also the Pinechest Shooting Club of
Thomasville, North Carolina. Mr. Cooper was for eight
years a member of the town council of Bramwell, a posi-
tion he now occupies.


From The History of West Virginia, Old and New, page 41

Submitted by Valerie F. Crook <vfcrook@trellis.net>

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