BURDETTE: Of Middle Fork in Curtis District.
Two brothers of this name appear to have come here about the same time; their names, Richard and Elijah. Of their marriages and families we have little information. Next following we give such as we have:
Richard, "Old Dick," as pioneers usually called him because of a grandson being known as "Dick Burdette," was a sporting man and particularly a horse fancier, bought, sold, traded and raced in any settlement that had a horse it cared to match against his; attended the horse races regularly at New Orleans; his career ended, he left in that neighborhood a son whose name was Thompson Burdette. Information of Thompson's career is more meager than that of his father; yet he left a son on the ancestral lands whose name is Perry Dixon Burdette, horn about the year 1850; he married in Curtis District Miss Mary Ellen Miller; they made their home on the Spencer and Ripley turnpike near Penil some twenty-five years, farming and trading.
To Perry D. Burdette and Mary E. (Miller), his wife, were born and grew up five sons and three daughters. Their names in order of births are as follows:
Camden Josiah, Lycurgus C., Thornton Cadmus, Georgia, Roy Teddy, Clyde, Flossie and Eupha.
Of these we can write further as follows:
Georgia married Kenna Ivens, residents now of Gay, West Virginia.
Flossie married Charles S. Knopp, of Liverpool, West Virginia.
Eupha became wife of V. L. Douglass, they reside in Spencer District.
Lycurgus C., while but a boy enlisted in the United States Army, became Sergeant of Battery C, First U. S. Artillery, and was one of the few of that battery who survived the historic Galveston Flood, of September 8, 1900. His story of the awful night, and of his clinging to a square of flooring of some wrecked building which he seized as it passed, and on which he was washed ashore, would be a small volume of itself; he is now a resident of the City of Spencer with his wife and family; he got a broken shoulder and crushed collar bone, permanent injuries, in that Galveston catastrophe; a generous government gives him a United States pension of twenty-five dollars a month.
Source: History of Roane County, West Virginia, 1774-1927 William H. Bishop, Esq. p 459-460
Submitter: Sandy Spradling, November 28, 1999
