Lee Bell, West Virginia

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Lee Bell
Unincorporated community
Lee Bell Location within the state of West Virginia Lee Bell Lee Bell (the United States) Show map of West VirginiaShow map of the United StatesShow all
Coordinates: 38°40′58″N 80°0′20″W / 38.68278°N 80.00556°W / 38.68278; -80.00556Coordinates: 38°40′58″N 80°0′20″W / 38.68278°N 80.00556°W / 38.68278; -80.00556
Country	United States
State	West Virginia
County	Randolph
Elevation	2,070 ft (630 m)
Time zone	UTC-5 (Eastern (EST))
• Summer (DST)	UTC-4 (EDT)
GNIS ID	1551761[1]

Lee Bell is an unincorporated community in Randolph County, West Virginia, United States. It was named after my grandfather Leander "Lee" Bell, born in 1885 in Joker, Calhoun County, West Virginia. At age 16, he had to go to work to support his mother and 6 siblings when his father died in a fall from a tree. Lee got a job with a timber company cutting some of the remaining stands of virgin timber from West Virginia's forests. When I was a boy in the 1950s, I recall asking him about why they named the "town" after him. His reply, and I remember it verbatim, was: "I beat up the town bully and drove him out." My grandfather was a small man, and I asked him how he did it. Again, his reply verbatim: "I just knocked him down and stomped on him with my loggers boots...Folks were so happy they named the place after me." At some point in the 1950s I visited Lee Bell with my parents. We found it from the map (I still have copies of old AAA maps with Lee Bell on them) and stopped to talk to an elderly man on his porch. We asked if he knew the place was called Lee Bell. He said he did, but that he didn't know why. He said it was now called Becky's Creek, named after a little girl named Becky who drowned in the creek that runs through the area. By 1910, Lee Bell had moved to Meigs County in southern Ohio to get a better paying job "cutting corn." He met my grandmother there and married in 1911. He realized that with the advent of the motor car, someone would need to know how to fix them. He bought a few books and taught himself auto mechanics. He became the chief mechanic at the state highway garage in Delaware County, Ohio. After retirement, they moved to Sunbury, Ohio where he died on July 4, 1958.

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