Lewis Ruffner

Lewis Ruffner (October 1, 1797 – 1883) 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.

General Ruffner became widowed and he and his second wife Viola (née Knapp) Ruffner (1820–1904), a schoolteacher whom he married in 1843, are remembered for employing a young Booker T. Washington as a houseboy in the years shortly after Emancipation. Mrs. Ruffner inspired Washington to seek an education and the couple and famous African American educator became lifelong friends.

Young Booker came to Malden, West Virginia with his mother Jane after Emanicipation in late 1865. Following other jobs of manual labor including working in the salt wells, he served as the Ruffner family's houseboy. He lived there until 1872, when he left to attend Hampton Institute at the age of sixteen.

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