A History Alive! event will be held at 2 p.m. Sunday in the community room at Pendleton County Library in Franklin. This year, presenter Doug Wood of Hurricane, will take us back to early Virginia frontier days.
Wood portrays Thomas Ingles of Virginia, whose life straddled two cultures before and after the birth of the United States.
Born to a pioneer Virginia couple, William and Mary Ingles, Ingles was captured along with his mother in a frontier raid at the age of four. He was given to a Shawnee family in present-day Ohio to be raised in place of their deceased child.
Returning to his birth parents as a Shawnee man at the age of 17, Ingles received a Virginia gentleman’s education and served in the Point Pleasant campaign of Dunmore’s War in 1774 — a conflict that pitted his Virginia and Shawnee communities against each other on the battlefield.
History Alive! is a program of the West Virginia Humanities Council that brings scholar-actors to schools, libraries, and similar venues to share a slice of history through the life of an historical character. In recent years these events, popular with all ages, have been sponsored annually at the library by Friends of Pendleton County Library and Pendleton County Committee for the Arts.