Samuel I. Cabell (1802 - July 18, 1865) was a wealthy Virginia plantation owner in the Kanawha River valley who may have been murdered for marrying one of his former slaves and providing for their descendants. Although seven white men were acquitted of crime, his will was honored and his descendants went on to lead productive lives. Part of his former plantation approximately nine miles west of what soon became the new state capital at Charleston, West Virginia became West Virginia State University, a historically black college.
Early life
While little is known about his ancestry and or roots, his death record indicates birth in Georgia, though some thought he was from England and many that he was related to the Cabell family, one of the First Families of Virginia. As such, this man would be distantly related to Samuel Jordan Cabell (1756-1818), who led Patriot troops in the American Revolutionary War before returning to run plantations in the upper James River watershed as well as represented the area in the Virginia General Assembly and U.S. House of Representatives until the year before this man's birth. That Col. S. J. Cabell's father, uncles and several cousins promoted the James River Canal, designed to link the James River to the Kanawha River on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains, thus allowing goods from the Ohio River valley to reach ports including the state capital at Richmond, Virginia, and Norfolk, Virginia with access to the Atlantic Ocean, as well as eastern manufactured goods to reach settlements of the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys. One of Col. S. J. Cabell's sons, William Symes Cabell, would move to (and die in) Hinds County, Mississippi, although his son would be a different Samuel Jordan Cabell.
Randolph W. Cabell, the most recent of Cabell family genealogists believes the West Virginia Cabells descended from Col. John Cabell (1735-1815), who served in the Virginia General Assembly and shared the same British emigrant grandfather as that Col. S. J. Cabell, as well as married Paulina Jordan in 1761. Records concerning his descendants were destroyed in a fire at the Buckingham County courthouse, but his will was discovered in the mid-1970s. Col. John Cabell would have two additional wives, raising an unnamed son of his second wife Elizabeth Brierton Jones, and having at least Alexander A Cabell and Napoleon Bonaparte Cabell with his third wife (the former Frances Johnson). Col. John Cabell's son by his first wife, Samuel Jordan Cabell (1776-1854) lived most of his life in Monroe County (which became West Virginia during the American Civil War) before moving westward and dying in Green County, Kentucky. Though both tributaries of the James River and New River (which flows into the Ohio River) drain Monroe County, his twin sons Samuel R. Cabell and Frederick Cabell were born in 1814.