Liston B. Ramsey

Who was Liston B. Ramsey?

Liston Bryan Ramsey was a prominent and influential member of the North Carolina House of Representatives for nearly four decades.

He was born in 1919 in rural Madison County, located deep in the Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina. He was the valedictorian of his senior class at Marshall High School in 1936, and two years later he earned an associate's degree from Mars Hill College, then a junior college located in his native Madison County. During the Second World War, Ramsey served as a sergeant in the U.S. Army Air Corps in the Pacific Theater of the war. After the war, Ramsey was elected to serve on the town board of aldermen for Marshall, North Carolina.

In 1960, running as a Democrat, Ramsey was elected to the North Carolina House of Representatives. He served 19 consecutive terms in the state legislature and became one of its most influential members. In 1981 he was elected Speaker of the House and would spend four terms in that post; he was the first legislator in North Carolina history to hold the Speaker's office for four terms. During his tenure as Speaker, he worked to transfer state funds to the often-neglected western mountain counties of North Carolina, building roads and other public facilities that would not have existed otherwise. A major accomplishment of his time as Speaker was the creation of the Liston B. Ramsey Activity Center at Western Carolina University. The Center, opened in 1986, features facilities for basketball, volleyball, and other sports, as well as sponsoring cultural activities on the Western Carolina campus.