Taken from History of Tucker County, West Virginia

By Homer Floyd Fansler

Henry Fansler, the first settler and namer of the Canaan Valley of Tucker County, West Virginia, was born in 1761, in Cumru township, Berks County, Pennsylvania, which was just a few miles south of the present city of Reading.  He was the eldest of the ten children of Dietrich and Eliza Margaret Fansler.

Dietrich, born in Pennsylvania, was evidently a son of one of the following five Palatinate (German) immigrants who arrived in the Port of Philadelphia on the ships and on the dates mentioned:  Philip Fansler, ship "William and Sarah," September 18, 1727; Mathias Fansler, ship "James Goodwill," September 11, 1728; Michael Fansler, ship "Allen," September 15, 1729; George Casper Fansler, ship "Townshend," October 5, 1737; and Ludwig Fansler, ship "Elizabeth," October 30, 1738.  The family genealogists have, so far, failed to establish the relationships beyond Dietrich.  Dietrich was a soldier in the Revolutionary War and in 1792 he moved from Berks County, Pennsylvania, to Shenandoah County, Virginia, where he died in 1808.

Henry Fansler was also a soldier in the Revolutionary War.  He served in the 8th Company, 6th Battalion of Pennsylvania Infantry.  He enlisted in September 1777, when he was sixteen years of age.  His company commanders were Captains Dark, Seeley and Adam Spoon.  His battalion commander was Colonel Crup.  He served another enlistment beginning in 1785, in Captain Peter Gower's Company of the 1st Battalion of the same infantry.  For his services in the Revolution he received a pension of $19.05 per month, for the last years of his life.

About the year 1790 he married Sarah Elizabeth Stone, presumably in Pennsylvania, and moved to the State of Virginia.  From old tax records it is found that he was living in Pendleton County in 1790, in Shenandoah County in 1797, and in Randolph County in 1802.  Canaan Valley was then in Randolph County and Henry Fansler came to Canaan about the year 1800.  He erected a crude cabin near Club Run, on what was later to become the Fred Cooper farm.  One can imagine his log cabin, its clapboard roof held in place by weight poles, its rough stone fireplace and hard clay hearth, its puncheon floor, plank door with wooden latch and small windows covered with dried panther skins.  The furniture was all home-made.  There was a loom, a hackle, a reel and spinning wheel.  Their clothing was all homespun from flax and wool and even their shoes were home-made from ash and lye tanned animal hides.  Their dishes were pewter, their knives of hand hammered steel, and their forks and spoons were made of hardwood.  Their stock consisted of a few cows, hogs, sheep and oxen, which lived most of the time in the woods.

Henry Fansler was a German and spoke the German language fluently.  When he first beheld the Canaan Valley he expressed the enthusiasm and hope of a pilgrim on finding his Mecca by exclaiming aloud in German:  "Besiehe Das Land Kanaan" (Behold the Land of Canaan), and that valley has ever afterward been known as the Canaan Valley.  There has been an abortive effort to credit one George Casey Harness with naming this valley in 1748, and of being the first white man to visit the valley.  This, or course, is erroneous.  The first white men to visit Canaan Valley were the forty men who surveyed the 76-mile Fairfax Line, from the head of Conway River to the head of Potomac River.  They crossed Canaan Valley between Cabin Mountain and Brown Mountain in October 1746.  Thomas Lewis, the journalist of the expedition, called the valley a laurel thicket.  Harness was not a settler but an alleged fur trader or explorer and a doubtful one at that.  Maxwell, Strother, Kennedy, and other historians of the locale do not mention him.

The first winter Henry Fansler and his family spent in Canaan Valley the snow got nine feet deep and the temperature forty degrees below zero.  Then there was a short, cold summer in which their crops froze and then another long, hard winter followed.  Henry Fansler began to think of the valley, not as the land of Canaan, but as the land of Black Forest snows he had heard his forefathers speak of in their native Germany.  He began to scout around for a new home and eventually found it near the mouth of Black Fork River where the town of Hendricks now stands.  It is not known just when he moved there but it was early in that century, maybe 1806 or before.  Here he purchased 170 acres from Isaac Booth and 100 acres from Noah Hayden.  Hayden and Booth were previously on the land, having acquired it by "tomahawk or settlers rights" or otherwise, and are, in all probability, the very first settlers of the present town of Hendricks.

Henry Fansler built two log homes on his land near Hendricks.  The first was up the river about a mile, near Limerock.  He later abandoned this one and it eventually fell to ruin and only a pile of rocks from the old foundations remain.  The other house was built about 1815, a half-mile below the location of the first.  The property is now owned by Mrs. Inez Fansler Swartz, of Parsons, a great-granddaughter of Henry Fansler.  She had the old house torn down in 1958 because it was in such a dilapidated condition it had become a menace to life and limb.  Here Henry Fansler lived out his life and here he died on October 12, 1843.  He is buried in the Fansler cemetery on the hill above Hendricks.  The D.A.R. has marked his grave and this writer recently procured a Government monument to be placed there.  Henry Fansler was a tall, broad-shouldered, athletic type of rugged individual, with long, snow-white hair and beard.  Besides farming he operated a grist mill that was taken over by his son Andrew, after his death, and by his grandson Adam, after Andrew's death, and operated until destroyed by the great flood of 1888.  Henry Fansler was a Lutheran and a member of Rader's Lutheran Church in Timberville, Virginia.

The name Fansler was originally spelled "Pfantzler" and means a planter or tiller of the soil; in other words, just a plain farmer.