William T. Price, Historical Sketches of Pocahontas County, West Virginia (1901)

A county history built from family recollections, read in the archive.org full text for the Hatten research (research/hatten/Hatten_Philbrick_Marvin.md, October 2026). The sketch “William Wanless” (pp. 455-459):

• “For more than a hundred years the Wanless name has been a familiar one in our region of country. According to tradition vaguely entertained, Ralph and Stephen Wanless, natives of England, came to Virginia and settled on the Wanless place, near Mount Tabor school house, in the ‘Hills,’ five miles north of Huntersville. One of Ralph’s sons was William Wanless, who married Nancy Wilson.”
• Rev. James Wanless, William’s brother, “was in his day widely known as a minister of the M. E. Church”; he married Elizabeth Sharp, daughter of John Sharp, Senior. Preaching on Matthew 11:8 against the fashions: “How would John the Baptist have looked in a swallow tailed coat, pointed toed shoes, pipe, whiskey bottle, and stovepipe hat, et cetera!” Their brother Stephen, a blacksmith, was killed while shoeing a refractory horse, and James reared his three sons.
• Ralph Wanless, Junior, married Anna Poage and was for some years the village blacksmith at Huntersville; John Wanless married Elizabeth Bridger and settled in Lewis County.
• “Most all the Wanless brothers were industrious and skillful workers in iron, acquired from their father, who seems to have been a genius in that line of industry … When Ralph Wanless and his sons wrought at the anvil and caused the primitive forests to ring with their strong and resonant striking of hammers and sledges, their business was of essential importance.” In those shops “were forged axes, hoes, shovel plows, bull-tongues, coulters, brush hooks, seng hoes, mattocks, broad axes, frows, grubbing hoes, pot hooks and pot hangers.”

The sketch does not name Ralph’s daughters.