Lewis Ruffner

Who was Lewis Ruffner?

Lewis Ruffner was a salt manufacturer from Malden in Kanawha County in the area near what is now Charleston, West Virginia. He was a community leader and a member of the Virginia General Assembly in the years before the American Civil War. He served in the West Virginia House of Delegates and was commissioned in the local militia by the new state as a Major General. In the years after the War, for a time, General Ruffner was in charge of the Lock and Dam Improvement Project of the U.S. Government on the Kanawha River. He died in 1883 after falling from a horse while extremely drunk.

Ruffner's daughter, Patti Ruffner Jacobs, became a prominent suffragist in Birmingham, Alabama.