Appalachian Figures
Appalachia has produced generals, governors, and nationally known reformers, yet some of its most influential figures left their mark through business ledgers and charity board minutes instead of stump speeches. One of those quieter figures was Ben Mitchell Williamson of Pike and Boyd Counties.
Born in the now vanished hamlet of White Post in Pike County on October 16, 1864, Williamson spent his childhood in the hill farms and creek bottoms of the Big Sandy country, attended local rural schools, and went on to Bethany College in what is now West Virginia. From there he built a wholesale hardware firm that became a backbone supplier for the Big Sandy Valley and the coalfields beyond. That fortune in hardware and coal helped fund a second career in public work, especially his leadership in the crippled children’s movement in Kentucky, and for four months in 1930 and 1931 it carried him all the way to a seat in the United States Senate.
Today, when his name appears at all, it is usually as a line in a roster of Kentucky senators. Looking at him from the vantage point of Pike County, Catlettsburg, and Ashland, though, tells a different story. He becomes a bridge between country post offices and national philanthropy, between courthouse heating contracts in Pikeville and federal standards for galvanized buckets, between a Pike County family that helped found Williamson, West Virginia, and a movement that tried to put disabled children into schools and hospitals instead of back rooms.
White Post, Long Branch, and the Williamson family
White Post is one of those Appalachian place names that survives mainly in old postal lists and map indexes. United States Geological Survey based references describe White Post Office as a historical post office site in Pike County at roughly 37.73 degrees north and 82.33 degrees west, a mark on the upper Big Sandy landscape rather than a town that still appears on modern road maps. The Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, in both its mid twentieth century printed edition and its modern online form, records that Ben Mitchell Williamson was born there on October 16, 1864, the son of a Pike County family already enmeshed in Big Sandy trade and development.
Lawrence County genealogical transcriptions help sketch the wider kin network. An obituary for Rush F. Williamson in the mid 1930s describes him as a brother of former Senator Ben Williamson of Ashland and as a son of Wallace J. Williamson, born at Long Branch in Pike County and often credited with founding the city of Williamson, West Virginia. This same notice ties the family to both sides of the Tug Fork, with relatives in Pike County, in the new coal town of Williamson, and downriver toward Catlettsburg and Ashland.
Taken together, these near contemporary sources place Ben in a family that moved along the same Long Branch and White Post roads later mapped in Pike County tax districts and census descriptions, a family that turned land along the Virginia and West Virginia lines into new towns and depot communities.
Building a hardware empire in the Big Sandy Valley
After Bethany College, Williamson did not head for Louisville or Lexington. Instead he went back into the eastern Kentucky trade he knew. The Biographical Directory notes that he entered the wholesale hardware business at Catlettsburg in 1886 and remained there until 1924, then moved the center of operations to Ashland.
Over time that business took on several legal styles: Ben Williamson Hardware Company, Ben Williamson Company, and Ben Williamson and Company, Incorporated. Kentucky Court of Appeals opinions from the early twentieth century, such as Williams v. Ben Williamson Co., show the firm suing and being sued over accounts, contracts, and construction projects. Later cases and commentary refer to Ben Williamson and Company as contractor on heating and mechanical work for public buildings, including litigation over a contract to install the heating system in the Pike County courthouse, which tied his business directly to courthouse square projects in his home region.
Newspaper based obituaries from the Lawrence County Genealogical and Historical Society highlight the firm’s reach. An obituary for traveling salesman Delbert Boggs, who died in 1931, describes him as a salesman for Ben Williamson Hardware Company of Ashland and notes that he was well known throughout Lawrence County and adjoining counties. Another local profile recalls Hawkins Bishop, born in Pike County and later remembered in Logan County, West Virginia, as a salesman who came into the area representing the Ben Williamson Hardware Company of Ashland and covered a territory that stretched deep into the coalfields.
Trade catalogs and federal technical bulletins make clear that this was not a small crossroads store. Coal mining catalogs from the 1910s list Ben Williamson Hardware of Ashland as an agent for mine supply manufacturers, placing the firm in the middle of the region’s coal equipment trade. In the 1930s, National Bureau of Standards publications on hot dipped galvanized ware and steel fence posts included Williamson, Ben and Company, Inc., Ashland, Kentucky, among the wholesale hardware firms cooperating in national standards programs.
For people who grew up in the Big Sandy Valley before World War II, those business relationships translated into daily experience. A reminiscence preserved on a Pike and Boyd County genealogical page recalls that when the writer was a boy in Boyd County, Ben Williamson hardware was the primary hardware supplier for the entire Big Sandy Valley. A county history of Boyd County, preserved in the Rennick collection, calls Ben Williamson, owner of a major Ashland hardware store, the most noted person produced in that section, a telling indicator of how business success and civic influence blended in that era.
Even in smaller local histories the firm appears as shorthand for industrial connections. A brief history of Long Branch Road near Rush, Kentucky, notes that in 1938 Landon Klaiber, who had handled explosives while working for Ben Williamson, applied for a license for the Klaiber Explosives Company. The hardware house was not only selling nails and stoves. It was hiring men who dealt in explosives, mining supplies, and the specialized equipment that powered gasoline, timber, and coal economies up and down the creeks.
Crippled children, hospitals, and interwar philanthropy
By the 1920s Williamson was wealthy enough to devote increasing time and money to public service. Federal biographical entries and later reference works agree that he became one of the founders of the Kentucky Crippled Children’s Commission in 1924 and served as its president from its creation until his death in 1941.
The commission itself grew out of a specific crisis. A centennial retrospective from the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services explains that in 1924 the General Assembly responded to widespread concern that children with disabilities, especially those affected by polio and tuberculosis, were going without medical care because their families could not afford treatment. Lawmakers established the Kentucky Crippled Children’s Commission, the ancestor of today’s Office for Children with Special Health Care Needs, to coordinate clinics, surgery, and follow up care.
Archival records from Berea College’s Mary Holloway Nursing collection describe nurses who drove Model A cars with rumble seats along rough mountain roads, persuading wary families to let their children travel to orthopedic clinics under the commission’s care. Oral history interviews with later commission staff echo those stories, remembering station wagons full of children headed from eastern Kentucky counties toward treatment in Lexington and Louisville.
Nationally, historians such as Leanna Duncan have shown that the early twentieth century crippled children’s movement included both disabled activists and networks of businessmen and civic leaders who built institutions like the International Society for Crippled Children. The Ohio Society for Crippled Children and the later International Society drew strong support from Rotary clubs. Rotary histories note that in 1930 the Rotary Foundation gave its first humanitarian grant, a five hundred dollar gift, to the International Society for Crippled Children.
In this landscape, Williamson stood out as one of the Kentucky businessmen who pushed their state into the middle of a national movement. The Biographical Directory and derivative references record that he served as director of the International Society for Crippled Children while simultaneously presiding over the Kentucky commission and sitting on the state Board of Charities and Corrections.
A striking visual artifact from this period survives in the University of Louisville’s Caufield and Shook Collection. A 1930 nitrate negative shows a head and shoulders portrait of an older white man in a suit and tie. The catalog description identifies him as Ben Mitchell Williamson, notes that he was a United States senator from Kentucky elected in 1930 and a founding member of the Kentucky Crippled Children’s Commission, and ties the photograph to an invoice from the Democratic State Campaign Committee. The portrait freezes him at the moment when hardware, philanthropy, and politics came together.
A four month Senate term from Sackett to Logan
Williamson’s brief tenure in Washington grew out of a complicated chain of events. In January 1930 Senator Frederic M. Sackett of Kentucky resigned to become United States ambassador to Germany. Governor Flem Sampson appointed Republican congressman John M. Robsion of Barbourville to fill the seat until an election could be held.
Under Kentucky law, that election took place on November 4, 1930, the same day as the regularly scheduled election for the next full term. In the regular contest, Democratic candidate Marvel Mills Logan defeated Robsion for the term beginning March 1931. In the special election to complete the final four months of Sackett’s old term, Democrats nominated Ben M. Williamson, describing him in campaign materials and later summaries as president of the Kentucky Crippled Children’s Commission.
Official election statistics compiled by the Clerk of the House of Representatives and summarized in modern references list Williamson receiving 326,723 votes, or just over fifty two percent of the total, to Robsion’s 297,510, a margin similar to Logan’s victory over Robsion in the regular race on the same ballot. The Senate’s own chronological tables of membership and its “States in the Senate” roster for Kentucky confirm that Williamson served as a Democratic senator from December 1, 1930 until March 3 or 4, 1931, occupying the same Class 2 seat in succession from Sackett to Robsion to Williamson and then to Logan.
The Official Congressional Directory for the Seventy first Congress lists him simply as “Ben M. Williamson, 20 Ashland,” placing him alongside colleagues from larger states and reminding readers that the man from White Post had become, at least briefly, Kentucky’s voice in the upper chamber. Contemporary reporting described him as a businessman and philanthropist rather than a career politician, and there is no evidence that he sought a longer term. Biographical references emphasize that he was not a candidate for reelection in 1930 and that after March 1931 he returned to his Ashland business interests.
Ashland, Catlettsburg, and family loss after Washington
After his four months in Washington, Williamson’s story returns to the river towns where he had made his money. He resumed the wholesale hardware business at Ashland, maintained a residence in neighboring Catlettsburg, and continued to serve on boards and commissions.
Family notices from the 1930s show how deeply he remained tied to Appalachian communities. An obituary for his son Wallace J. Williamson, published in a regional paper and preserved by the Lawrence County Genealogical and Historical Society, describes Wallace as a son of former United States Senator Ben Williamson and notes his education, his career, and his connections to Ashland and Catlettsburg. The obituary for his brother Rush F. Williamson, mentioned earlier, reinforces the picture of a family that spread from Long Branch in Pike County to the developing coal and river towns all along the Big Sandy and Tug Fork corridors.
Other brief notices underscore the social status attached to the title “Senator.” A 1934 travel note in a Georgia newspaper, for example, reported that Senator Ben Williamson of Kentucky and Mrs. Williamson passed through Americus on their way to Florida and praised a new United States Highway route, a reminder that even after his short term he was still introduced as “Senator” in civic settings.
Federal bankruptcy and corporate cases from the late 1930s and early 1940s show his son Ben Williamson Jr. appearing as trustee in financial restructurings, suggesting that the family continued to play a role in regional business life beyond the hardware trade.
Williamson’s own life ended far from White Post but not far from his business orbit. Contemporary Associated Press reports in June 1941 announced that Ben Williamson, seventy six, of Ashland, Kentucky, former United States senator, had died in Cincinnati. Find A Grave transcriptions and photographs record his burial in the Ashland Cemetery mausoleum, along with later interments of family members including his son Ben Jr., cementing his place among the leading families of Ashland and Catlettsburg.
Remembering a Pike County senator
It would be easy to dismiss Ben M. Williamson as a footnote in national political history. His Senate service lasted only a single winter. He chaired no famous committee and authored no landmark legislation. Yet looked at from Pike and Boyd Counties, his life illuminates several important themes in Appalachian history.
First, his story highlights the role of regional wholesalers and jobbers in building the material foundations of Appalachian modernization. From the 1880s through the 1930s, the Ben Williamson hardware firms connected small town stores, courthouse projects, and coal operations in places like Lawrence County, Pike County, and Logan County to national manufacturers and federal standards. The firm appears in coal mining catalogs, in federal standards manuals, in county level obituaries, and in memories of traveling salesmen.
Second, his leadership in the Kentucky Crippled Children’s Commission and the International Society for Crippled Children shows how Appalachian businessmen participated in broader interwar movements that reshaped disability policy. Williamson helped preside over a system that took mountain children with polio, tuberculosis, and orthopedic conditions out of isolated hollows and into hospital wards and clinics, even as scholars today wrestle with the paternalism and limits of those programs.
Third, his short term in the Senate captures a moment when the Great Depression was upending Kentucky politics. In 1930 the same electorate that had sent Republican Frederick Sackett and John M. Robsion to Washington turned to Democrats Logan and Williamson, replacing an ambassador senator and his appointed successor with a state judge and a hardware wholesaler who was best known for his work with disabled children.
Finally, his life reminds us that Appalachian political influence has often moved through individuals who held only brief formal office. Business leaders with one foot in Pike County post office communities and another in Ashland corporate boardrooms could leverage economic power into philanthropy and short bursts of political authority, then retreat again into the networks of hardware suppliers, bank directors, and commission boards that shaped everyday life.
A century after the creation of the Kentucky Crippled Children’s Commission and more than eighty years after Williamson’s death, the office that succeeded his commission still serves tens of thousands of Kentucky children each year. The White Post of his birth survives mostly as a dot in a geographic database, but the institutions he helped build have outlived both that post office and his brief time on the Senate roll.
Sources and further reading
Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, “WILLIAMSON, Ben Mitchell (W000550),” print and online editions. Official federal biographical entry for birth, education, business career, public offices, and dates of Senate service.Bioguide+2Wikipedia+2
Biographical Directory of the American Congress, 1774–1949. Government Printing Office. Mid twentieth century printed form of the same entry for Williamson, useful as a contemporary reference work.Wikipedia
“States in the Senate: Kentucky” and “Senators of the United States, 1789–present,” U.S. Senate Historical Office. Chronological tables and state rosters confirming Williamson’s term from December 1, 1930 to March 3 or 4, 1931 and his place in the succession from Sackett to Logan.U.S. Senate+2Wikipedia+2
“Statistics of the Congressional Election of November 4, 1930,” Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives, 1931, as summarized in “1930 United States Senate elections in Kentucky.” Official vote counts for the regular and special Senate elections in which M. M. Logan and Ben M. Williamson defeated John M. Robsion.Wikipedia+1
Caufield and Shook Collection, University of Louisville Photographic Archives, item ULPA CS_112868, “Ben Mitchell Williamson portrait, 1930.” Copy photograph of a painted portrait commissioned by the Democratic State Campaign Committee, identifying Williamson as senator and founding member of the Kentucky Crippled Children’s Commission.Digital Library of Louisville
National Bureau of Standards publications such as “Standard grade hot dipped galvanized ware” and “Steel Fence Posts: Field and Line Type,” which list Williamson, Ben and Company, Incorporated, of Ashland, Kentucky, among cooperating wholesale hardware firms. Evidence of the company’s national footprint.GovInfo+1
Coal mining trade catalogs and agency lists that identify Ben Williamson Hardware of Ashland as an agent for mining equipment manufacturers, illustrating the firm’s role in the coal economy.Internet Archive
Williams v. Ben Williamson Co. and related cases in the Kentucky Court of Appeals, along with later citations to Williams v. Ben Williamson and Company, Incorporated, as evidence of the firm’s contracting work and legal presence in Pike and surrounding counties.CaseMine+1
Lawrence County, Kentucky Genealogical and Historical Society obituary transcriptions for Delbert Boggs, Wallace J. Williamson, Rush F. Williamson, and others, which document salesmen and relatives associated with Ben Williamson Hardware and describe Rush as a brother of ex Senator Ben Williamson and a son of Wallace J. Williamson of Long Branch, Pike County.LCKGHS+2LCKGHS+2
Boyd County history manuscripts in the Rennick collection, which describe Ben Williamson of Ashland as the most noted person produced in a section of Boyd County, shedding light on his local reputation.CORE
YellowMaps and other USGS based references for “White Post Office (historical), Pike County, Kentucky,” which locate the community listed as Williamson’s birthplace and help map the Long Branch and White Post area.YellowMaps+1
Find A Grave entries for Ben Mitchell Williamson and Ben Mitchell Williamson Jr., including photographs of the Ashland Cemetery mausoleum and basic biographical details drawn from obituaries and grave markers.Find a Grave+1
Associated Press style death notices such as “Senator Ben Williamson Dies,” carried in regional papers in June 1941, summarizing his life as a former senator and Ashland businessman at the time of his death.Newspapers.com+1
Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services, “We are celebrating 100 years of our Office for Children with Special Health Care Needs,” and related posts marking the centennial of the Kentucky Crippled Children’s Commission, along with Mary Holloway nursing records and oral histories that describe the commission’s work in rural Kentucky.Nunn Center+3facebook.com+3LinkedIn+3
Leanna Duncan, “Changing Bodies and Minds: ‘Crippled Children’ and Their Movement in the United States, 1890–1960,” dissertation and related articles, along with Rotary Foundation histories that trace the origins of the International Society for Crippled Children and early Rotary support for it. These secondary sources provide national context for Williamson’s philanthropic work.Indianapolis East Rotary+7IDEALS+7Children and Youth History Society+7