Joseph H. Diss Debar

Joseph Hubert Diss Debar (6 March 1820 – 13 January 1905) was a French-born American artist and government official who designed the official seal and coat-of-arms for the state of West Virginia in 1863. Many of his sketches of early West Virginia figures and scenes survive.

Diss Debar was born in Strasbourg, in the Alsace region of France, in 1820. The son of Francis Joseph Diss Debar — the estate manager for Cardinal Prince de Rohan — he was educated at schools in Strasbourg, Colmar, Muhlhausen and Paris. He is said to have emigrated to the United States in 1842 on board the same ship as Charles Dickens, whom he met and sketched. His move was occasioned by his pursuit of his intended, Clara Levassor (1829-1849) — then a mere 13 years old — whose family had settled in Parkersburg, Virginia on the Ohio River.

Diss Debar was hired in 1846 by John Peter Dumas of Paris as agent for a 10,000-acre tract on Cove Creek in newly created Doddridge County, Virginia. (This was part of a major land-holding covering several counties in the north central part of the state which was known as the Swan Lands; it had been acquired by Boston financier James Swan (1754-1830) before 1809 and comprised 1,079,724 acres of then-unappropriated lands originally purchased for 2 cents an acre.) In 1847 Diss Debar married Clara at Marietta, Ohio. He was 27, she 17. On April 29, 1849, she died in childbirth, survived by a son, Joseph Henry Diss Debar Jr. Her parents, the Levassors, took charge of the baby, raising him in Cincinnati. (This son lived to be a very old man, but left no heirs.)

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