Daniel Duane Tompkins Farnsworth (23 December 1819–5 December 1892), member of the Second Wheeling Convention of 1861, was born on Staten Island, New York. His parents, James S. Farnsworth and Abigail Wilcox Farnsworth, named him for a former governor of New York who was then serving as vice president of the United States. Farnsworth's grandfather and father moved their families to Virginia in 1821 and settled in the town of Buckhannon in the part of Lewis County that in 1851 became Upshur County. As a young man, Farnsworth went to Clarksburg to learn to be a tailor and then returned to Buckhannon to ply his trade, which he expanded into a profitable mercantile business. He acquired land and about 1860 built a large mill in the town. On 30 November 1841 Farnsworth married Ann M. Gibson, of Harrison County. Before she died on 23 January 1852, they had four daughters and two sons. On 15 November 1853 he married Mary J. Ireland, of Upshur County. They had five daughters and five sons.

Farnsworth served on the first grand jury empanelled in the new county of Upshur in 1851 and four years later became the town clerk of Buckhannon. Like a majority of the other men in the county, he was a Democrat. Farnsworth voted for the Northern Democratic candidate, Stephen A. Douglas, for president in 1860, but he and many of the county's other Democrats who opposed secession during the ensuing crisis became Republicans. On 23 May 1861 when a majority of the county's voters rejected the Ordinance of Secession, they elected Farnsworth to the House of Delegates, scheduled to convene in Richmond in December. He twice risked being shot, once when he spoke in defense of the Union before a Philippi crowd that included secessionists, and again when he called the bluff of Buckhannon secessionists who threatened violence if he tried to prevent them from lowering the United States flag on the county courthouse.

As a member-elect of the General Assembly, Farnsworth was entitled to a seat in the convention that met in Wheeling from 11 to 25 June and from 6 to 21 August 1861. Declaring that the principal state offices had become vacant when the governor and other officeholders accepted secession and joined Virginia to the Confederacy, the convention elected new officials and re-created the state government in Wheeling. The president of the United States recognized that government (usually referred to as the Restored government) as the legitimate state authority in Virginia. Farnsworth served on the convention's Committee on Business, which had oversight of all resolutions related to state and federal relations. On 14 June 1861 he offered a resolution declaring that the ultimate purpose of reorganizing the state was to provide a legal method for dividing Virginia into two states. Although Farnsworth did not recommend immediate division, his was one of the first resolutions that led to the creation of West Virginia. During the August session he introduced a plan for the division of Virginia into two states and presided over the committee that reconciled his proposal with several others and drafted an ordinance to create a new state, which his committee proposed calling Kanawha.

Farnsworth represented Upshur County in the sessions of the Virginia House of Delegates that met in Wheeling from 1 to 26 July 1861 and between December 1861 and February 1863. He served on the standing Committees on Claims, for Courts of Justice, and on Finance. Following the admission of West Virginia to the Union in June 1863, he represented Upshur County in the first House of Delegates of West Virginia and afterward in the Senate of West Virginia for seven years. Even though he was not an attorney, Farnsworth served on the legislative committee that in 1868 revised the Code of West Virginia. On 26 February 1869, when Governor Arthur Ingraham Boreman resigned to assume a seat in the United States Senate, Farnsworth as president of the Senate succeeded him and served as governor of West Virginia until the end of the term six days later, on 4 March 1869.

Farnsworth attended the West Virginia constitutional convention of 1872. As a member of the Republican minority he was assigned to a low-ranking seat on the Committee on the Executive Department. On 9 April he voted against the new constitution, which significantly revised the state's first constitution. Farnsworth lost a state senate race in 1874 and was an unsuccessful candidate for presidential elector on the Republican Party ticket two years later. By 1878 his business interests had led him into the Greenback Party, which advocated inflation of the currency to stimulate economic growth and supported the rights of laboring men, with whom as a former tailor he sympathized. By 1888, after the Greenback Party failed, Farnsworth had become a Democrat.

After the Civil War, Farnsworth constructed a large, ornate Victorian house in Buckhannon. He dealt in land and timber, helped found in 1881 the Buckhannon Bank, later served as president of the Exchange Bank in Buckhannon, and was president of a company that planned but was unable to complete construction of a railroad from Grafton to Weston. Farnsworth was a lay leader in the Baptist Church and once boasted that he had built the Baptist church in Buckhannon. Daniel Duane Tompkins Farnsworth died of Bright's disease, a kidney ailment, on 5 December 1892 at his home in Buckhannon, West Virginia, and was buried in Heavener Cemetery.

Sources Consulted:
Biographies in George W. Atkinson and Alvaro F. Gibbens, Prominent Men of West Virginia (1890), 314–315 (with birth date), W. B. Cutright, The History of Upshur County, West Virginia … (1907), 441–444 (portrait opp. 360), and John G. Morgan, West Virginia Governors, 1863–1980, 2d ed. (1980), 16 (portrait), 17–18; Earle H. Morris, ed., Marriage Records, Harrison County, Virginia–(West Virginia), 1784–1850 (1966), 228; Wes Cochran, Upshur County, WV, Marriages, 1851–1896 (1992), 4; correspondence in Kellian Van Rensalear Whaley Papers, Virginia Museum of History and Culture, Richmond, in Kellian Van Rensalear Whaley Papers, West Virginia State Archives, Charleston, W.Va., and in Arthur I. Boreman Papers and John W. Mason Papers, both West Virginia University, Morgantown, W.Va.; Journal of Constitutional Convention, Assembled at Charleston, West Virginia, January 16, 1872 (1872), 315; Wheeling Register, 7, 20 Oct. 1874, 6 Dec. 1876, 5 Sept. 1878, 27 May 1880, 20, 22 Jan. 1883, 24 July, 2 Aug. 1888; Granville Davisson Hall, The Rending of Virginia: A History (1902), with portrait on 373; Virgil A. Lewis, How West Virginia Was Made … (1909), esp. 118, 213–215, 283–288; obituary in Wheeling Register, 10 Dec. 1892.

Photograph in Cutright, History of Upshur County, West Virginia (1907).

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Jonathan M. Berkey.

How to cite this page:
Jonathan M. Berkey, "Daniel Duane Tompkins Farnsworth (1819–1892)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2025 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Farnsworth_Daniel_D_T, accessed [today's date]).

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