William B. Thompson


William B. Thompson was a Virginia farmer and politician who served a term in the Virginia House of Delegates representing Jefferson County, Virginia.
Jefferson County voters elected him as one of their representatives in the Virginia House of Delegates in 1846, but neither he nor Jefferson County's other part-time delegate during that session, lawyer Andrew Hunter, won re-election.
Although he shared a similar common name with Will Thompson, one of John Brown's raiders who died in the raid on Harper's Ferry , the Virginia delegate was a different man. The raider was from near Lake Placid, in Essex County, New York. Will Thompson, his brother Dauphin Thompson and his brother-in-law Capt. Watson Brown arrived in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania during the summer of 1858.
The farmer Thompson by contrast likely was related to a Presbyterian preacher of the same surname, whose descendants lived along the Shenandoah Valley and in western Virginia. Likely, this Thompson moved with his wife and child further along the National Road to adjoining Morgan County, where he shows as owning just $1000 worth of land in the 1850 census. Farmer "William Thompson" shows in the 1860 state census in Morgan County, and another man with the same name lived even further along the railroad or National Road in Berkeley County in the same year. In the 1870 federal census, William Thompson at age 73 still farmed at Rock Gap in Morgan County, West Virginia, with his wife and several children, and his land had increased in value to $2500.
His successor in the House of Delegates might be a relative, or the railroad worker John A. Thompson who appears on the 1870 U.S. Federal Census for Martinsburg in Berkeley County, West Virginia, but probably not the Fairfax, Virginia miller in that census.