Appalachian Figures
On a quiet day in Edinburg, Virginia, you can walk into the Shenandoah County Library and find a doorway that opens into the past. The sign over that doorway reads “Truban Archives.” Inside are shelves of county records, family photographs, oral histories, and rare local publications that might otherwise have disappeared.
Those rooms exist because a Woodstock veterinarian turned state senator decided that his home county deserved a proper memory. In 2001 Dr. William A. “Doc” Truban made a major gift that allowed the library to build a dedicated archival wing. The county named the new space for him, and it has grown into one of the most important local history collections in the Shenandoah Valley.
The story of William Andonia Truban runs from New Deal coal towns along the upper Potomac to the dairy barns of the Valley and the budget debates of Richmond. It is the story of a first generation American who carried the discipline of farm calls and the caution of a coal miner’s son into the Virginia Senate, then used his resources late in life to make sure other people’s stories were preserved.
This is an Appalachian life that begins in a coal camp and ends in an archive.
Coal Camps On The Upper Potomac
William Andonia Truban was born 6 October 1924 in Garrett County, Maryland, on the Maryland side of the Potomac River opposite the little West Virginia town of Gormania. Different records give his birthplace as Gorman, Maryland, or “Gormania” more broadly, but all point to the same coal belt that straddles the state line. His father, Joseph Jioacchino Truban, had emigrated from Pietranico in the Abruzzo region of Italy and worked in the mines and industrial jobs that lined the river. His mother, Mae Viola Parks, was from a long rooted Appalachian family that connected the Italian newcomer to local networks of kin and church.
William was one of several children in a household that moved back and forth along the Maryland and West Virginia side of the upper Potomac. His older sister Gladys’s obituary remembers that she was born in 1918 in Dobbin, West Virginia, “a coal mining town along the Potomac River that separates Maryland and West Virginia” and that the family moved a few miles east to Red Oak, Maryland, in 1921.
There, in Red Oak, the Truban children went to a one room school and watched the coal economy rise and fall during the Great Depression. Their father died in 1936, when William was in his early teens. His younger brother Theodore’s obituary describes Joseph and Mae simply as “Joseph and Mae Parks Truban” of Red Oak, and remembers Leo as a World War II Marine who later worked for the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police and the Supreme Court.
Those fragments sketch the world that shaped the young William. A coal county where wages were hard won, work was dangerous, and families made do with gardens and livestock. A first generation Italian household where English might be a second language and church and kin networks were crucial safety nets. And a small rural school where a bright student could see education as a ticket out of the mines.
War In The China Burma India Theater
Like many Appalachian boys born in the 1920s, William Truban came of age with war looming. He enlisted in the United States Army on 15 March 1943 at Baltimore. Federal enlistment records and later biographical sketches agree that he served in the Army Air Forces in the China Burma India theater of World War II and that he returned home with three Bronze Stars.
The China Burma India theater is less familiar than Normandy or the Pacific island campaigns, but it was a crucial and punishing front. American airmen flew supplies “over the Hump” of the Himalayas into China, supported British and Indian ground forces in Burma, and helped keep open routes that tied Allied strategy together. Conditions were harsh, bases were far from home, and the air crews faced brutal weather alongside enemy fire.
In a tribute read into the Congressional Record after his death, Representative Frank Wolf of Virginia summarized Truban’s service and underlined the medals. Wolf relied heavily on a Winchester Star obituary that remembered a young man who had left the coal country of Maryland for far off airfields and come back with a record of hard duty and quiet courage.
For William Truban, the war mattered in another way. It opened doors. Like so many veterans, he used the GI Bill to go to college. That decision would change not only his own life but the economic and political life of Shenandoah County.
From Coal Country To The Campus
After the war Truban enrolled at West Virginia Wesleyan College, a small Methodist school that drew students from across the central Appalachian region. College records and alumni lists place him there in the late 1940s as a pre veterinary student, and it was on that campus that he met Mildred “Millie” Hayes of New Kensington, Pennsylvania. She would become his wife and partner in what one obituary later called a 58 year marriage.
The match made sense. Both came from working class backgrounds in industrial Appalachia. Both valued education. And both were people of faith who stayed deeply involved in Methodist congregations for the rest of their lives.
From Wesleyan Truban went on to the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine. He graduated in 1953, part of a generation of veterinarians trained in urban teaching hospitals who then carried new techniques back into rural communities. A short alumni obituary in the Pennsylvania Gazette later noted that he was an alumnus of the veterinary school’s class of 1953 and that, soon after graduation, he put his skills to work in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.
“Doc” In The Dairy Barns Of Shenandoah County
By the early 1950s William and Millie Truban had settled in Woodstock, the seat of Shenandoah County. Census records and professional directories show him there as a veterinarian. The Pennsylvania Gazette would later describe him as the first licensed veterinarian in Shenandoah County, and his colleagues in the American Veterinary Medical Association remembered that he ran the Shenandoah Animal Hospital and worked both as a small animal vet and a large animal practitioner who made farm calls across the northern Valley.
In those years the Shenandoah Valley was still very much a dairy and livestock region. Vets like Truban rose before dawn, drove up Back Road hollows and across Massanutten to reach scattered farms, and made a living one calf, one sow, and one barn cat at a time.
The Winchester Star obituary reprinted in the Congressional Record preserves one of the stories that local people told on him. Then Governor Linwood Holton, making a swing through the Valley, was taken to meet the Woodstock veterinarian everyone talked about. Holton found “Doc” Truban under a cow in a barn, finishing a call. It is an image that captures the man as his neighbors knew him: practical, unpretentious, and rooted in the daily work of a farm community.
By the late 1960s he was not only the valley’s go to veterinarian but also an important figure in local civic life. He was active in the Woodstock United Methodist Church, in Rotary and other service organizations, and in the regional and state veterinary associations. A 1972 article in the Virginia Advocate, preserved on microfilm in the Library of Virginia’s Virginia Chronicle project, singled him out as “Veterinarian of the Year” and noted his leadership in both professional and church circles.
For many families in Shenandoah County and the surrounding area, the first place they saw William A. Truban was not on a ballot but in a barn, a waiting room, or a 4 H event. The valley knew him as “Doc” long before it knew him as “Senator.”
A Republican From The Valley
In 1970 the seat for the old 21st District of the Virginia Senate opened when Senator J. Kenneth Robinson moved on to other office. Local Republicans in the northern Valley turned to the veterinarian they already trusted to run in the special election. He won, took office in January 1971, and then continued to serve through the redistricting that created the 27th District, which included Shenandoah, Frederick, Clarke, and Loudoun Counties and the city of Winchester.
For more than two decades, from 1971 until his retirement in 1992, William A. Truban represented that swath of northern Virginia in the state Senate. He sat at a political hinge point. The old Byrd Democratic machine was waning. The modern Republican Party was rising in the suburbs. The Shenandoah Valley, long more conservative than the Tidewater, was becoming an important part of the GOP coalition.
Truban became one of the most visible Republican voices in the Senate. By the mid 1980s he served as minority floor leader, a fact noted in Washington Post coverage of the Senate Finance Committee’s membership. In 1986 the Post described him as a Woodstock veterinarian and the Republican leader on the powerful Finance Committee, a position that gave him direct influence over state budgets even though his party still held a minority of seats.
He was not a bomb thrower. Contemporary accounts show a careful, methodical legislator who earned good marks from pro business rating groups yet also kept the respect of Democrats. A 1987 story in the Southwest Times covering legislative scorecards referred to him as the Republican floor leader but treated him as part of an institution that still prized collegiality.
Another Washington Post piece from 1986, on the health problems of senator John Chichester, quoted Truban in a tone of concern and respect rather than partisanship. He came across as a colleague worried about a friend’s well being and about the functioning of the chamber as a whole.
A Farmer’s View Of The State Budget
Truban’s most important work in Richmond did not make splashy headlines. It showed up instead in the steady labor of committees and study commissions. He was a long serving member of the Senate Finance Committee and sat on several Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) studies of state fiscal policy and state aid to localities.
Those reports from the 1970s and 1980s list him by name among the senators charged with examining how Richmond distributed money to counties and cities, how the state should plan for economic downturns, and how to make budgeting more predictable.
In the late 1980s and around 1990 he championed the idea of a “revenue stabilization fund” that would set aside money in good years to cushion the next recession. JLARC’s later history of that fund notes that an early attempt to create it failed in 1990, but that the concept eventually succeeded and became part of Virginia’s fiscal architecture. Truban’s name appears in that history as one of the legislators who pushed the idea before it was popular.
For a veterinarian and farmer from Shenandoah County, this kind of cautious budgeting made sense. People who depended on milk prices, hay yields, and calf crops knew that boom years never lasted. A rainy day fund was simply good husbandry scaled up to the level of a state treasury.
Building Institutions For Animals And People
Even as he carried budget binders in Richmond, Truban remained deeply involved in veterinary medicine. The American Veterinary Medical Association’s obituary notes that he helped establish the Virginia Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine at Virginia Tech, an institution created so that students from both states could obtain veterinary training closer to home.
He served on the Virginia Board of Veterinary Examiners and on committees of the Virginia Veterinary Medical Association, which honored him during his career. In the valley he mentored younger veterinarians who would eventually take over portions of his practice and carry on the Shenandoah Animal Hospital name.
His interest in human health shows up as well. A 1998 Senate Joint Resolution appointed him to the Hemophilia Advisory Board, using his Woodstock address and giving a glimpse of his continued engagement with statewide health policy after he left the Senate.
These roles, stretched over decades, built institutions that outlived him. The veterinary college has trained generations of vets who now serve Appalachian communities. State health boards and advisory commissions still bear the imprint of the long policy debates in which “Doc” Truban took part.
Doc, The County Fair, And The Archives
Newspaper clippings and local photographs show Truban not just in suits in Richmond but also in shirtsleeves at the Shenandoah County Fair. One image in the Shenandoah County Library’s digital archives captures him at the center of a “Racing Award” presentation, standing beside Mervel Fravel as they hand a trophy to a winning driver at the fairgrounds.
It is a small moment, but it reflects how he spent much of his life. County fairs, Rotary banquets, church suppers, and civic meetings filled his calendar. He sponsored 4 H and FFA events. He sat on local boards. He used the same presence that calmed nervous farmers in a barnyard to calm nervous voters at a town hall.
The most visible local legacy of that civic life is the Truban Archives. The Shenandoah County Library’s description of the archives makes it clear that a major gift from Dr. William A. Truban in 2001 made the expansion possible. The library used those funds to create climate controlled storage, research space, and a program for preserving photographs, manuscripts, and rare books related to Shenandoah County history.
Today researchers, genealogists, and local students use those materials to reconstruct everything from the history of town baseball teams to the stories of Black cemeteries and school desegregation. The archives that bear his name have become a hub of Appalachian memory work in the northern Valley.
In that sense, Truban’s final public act was to make sure other people’s stories would not be lost. A coal miner’s son from the Maryland side of the Potomac helped fund a place where future generations could come and read about miners, farmers, veterans, and local officials like himself.
Family, Faith, And The End Of A Long Life
William and Mildred “Millie” Truban raised six children while juggling farm calls and political sessions. Her obituary remembers her as a graduate of West Virginia Wesleyan, a musician and church worker, and a partner in her husband’s veterinary and political life. It notes that the couple were married for 58 years, that they moved repeatedly between Woodstock and the wider region as his work demanded, and that she remained active in Methodist and community service until her death in 2014.
Dr. William A. Truban died on 3 February 2007 at age 82. Obituaries in the Washington Times, the Pennsylvania Gazette, AVMA News, and local papers all told much the same story. A young man from coal country who served in the China Burma India theater, came home with three Bronze Stars, became the first licensed veterinarian in Shenandoah County, represented the Valley for more than twenty years in the state Senate, and helped build both a veterinary college and a county archive.
The Virginia General Assembly responded with Senate Joint Resolution 494, “Celebrating the life of William A. Truban.” It formally recorded his contributions and praised his “dedicated service to the people of the Commonwealth.” It also noted his role in the founding of the Virginia Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine and his long tenure as Senate Republican leader.
Representative Frank Wolf took to the floor of the U.S. House to add a Congressional tribute. By inserting the Winchester Star obituary into the record, he ensured that Truban’s story would join the permanent federal archive as well as the local one he had helped create.
Why Doc Truban Matters In Appalachian History
At first glance, William A. “Doc” Truban might seem like a local figure. A valley vet, a Shenandoah County politician, a name on a building.
Look closer and he becomes a lens on larger Appalachian themes.
He was the child of an Italian coal miner and a local Appalachian mother, growing up in the upper Potomac coal fields at a time when immigrant families were reshaping mountain communities. His life traces one of the common migration paths in twentieth century Appalachia, from coal camps in Maryland and West Virginia to farm country in the Valley and the edges of the Washington suburbs.
He belonged to the generation of veterans who used the GI Bill to climb educational ladders that had been closed to their parents. That education fed not only his own rise as a professional but also the development of regional institutions like the veterinary college at Virginia Tech.
In politics, he bridged the gap between the old Byrd courthouse culture and the new Republican ascendancy in northern Virginia. As a Republican minority leader who believed in careful budgeting and local control, he embodied a strand of Appalachian conservatism shaped more by barns and church basements than by national media.
And in the end he used his wealth to endow an archive that now preserves the stories of people whose names will never appear in the Congressional Record. That choice reflects a particularly Appalachian understanding of legacy. It is not about statues so much as it is about making sure that kin, neighbors, and ordinary citizens leave a trace.
For readers of AppalachianHistorian.org, Doc Truban’s story offers a reminder that the people who shape our region’s history are not always the loudest voices. Sometimes they are the vets who show up at three in the morning when a cow is down. Sometimes they are the senators who spend more time in committee hearings than on television. And sometimes, if we are lucky, they are the donors who understand that the best way to honor a place is to help it remember itself.
Sources And Further Reading
Virginia General Assembly, Senate Joint Resolution 494 (2007), “Celebrating the life of William A. Truban.” legacylis.virginia.gov
Congressional Record, “Remembering State Senator William A. Truban” (remarks of Rep. Frank Wolf, 2007), incorporating a Winchester Star obituary and summarizing military and political service. Congress.gov
Virginia Elections Database entries for Senate Districts 21 and 27, election cycles 1971 through 1987, documenting his repeated election to the Virginia Senate. fhnfuneralhome.com
JLARC, Revenue Stabilization Fund in Virginia and related histories that credit Senator Truban with sponsoring early revenue stabilization proposals.
Virginia legislative reports on state aid to localities and legislative management that list William A. Truban as a member of key study commissions. Shenandoah Animal Hospital+1
World War II Army enlistment records for William A. Truban, noting induction at Baltimore on 15 March 1943 and service in the Army Air Forces. Wikipedia
The Pennsylvania Gazette alumni obituary for Dr. William A. Truban, V.M.D. ’53, summarizing his education at West Virginia Wesleyan College and the University of Pennsylvania and calling him the first licensed veterinarian in Shenandoah County. Congress.gov
West Virginia Wesleyan College alumni materials that list William A. Truban among notable graduates. countylib.org
American Veterinary Medical Association, JAVMA News obituary for William A. Truban, detailing his practice in Woodstock, leadership positions in veterinary organizations, and his role in establishing the Virginia Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine.
Washington Times, “William A. Truban, 82, former state senator” (2007), a substantial obituary used by later writers. JLARC
Obituary of Mildred “Millie” H. Truban, Heishman Funeral Home / Valley Funeral Service, describing her West Virginia Wesleyan background, long marriage to William A. “Doc” Truban, and family and church work. valleyfs.com+1
Obituaries of Gladys Truban Harvey and Theodore Leo Truban, Fellows, Helfenbein & Newnam Funeral Home and Star Democrat / Legacy, documenting the family’s roots in Dobbin, West Virginia, and Red Oak, Maryland, and giving context for William’s childhood environment. fhnfuneralhome.com+2fhnfuneralhome.com+2
Shenandoah County Library, “Truban Archives” description and “Our Mission” page, explaining that a major donation by Dr. William A. Truban in 2001 enabled the creation of a dedicated archival wing for county history. archives.countylib.org+1
Shenandoah County Library Digital Archives, item “Racing Award,” photograph of Dr. William Truban and Mervel Fravel presenting a trophy at the Shenandoah County Fair. countylib.org
The Washington Post, “Virginia Senate Finance Panel Members” (1986), noting that William A. Truban of Woodstock, a veterinarian, served as Senate Republican leader and a member of the Finance Committee. Find a Grave+1
The Washington Post, “Worn Out and Hurt, Chichester Becomes a Silent Senator” (1986), quoting Truban’s comments on Senator John Chichester and illustrating his tone and relationships in the chamber. Penn Open Access Publishing
Wikipedia, “William Truban,” summarizing his Senate districts, party, and basic biographical details, with citations to Virginia manuals, election records, and obituaries.
FamilySearch and Find A Grave entries for William Andonio Truban and his relatives, used as guides to underlying census, burial, and immigration records for the Truban family’s movements between West Virginia, Maryland, and Virginia.