Ulysses Hinchman: The Physician-Politician Who Gave His Name to a West Virginia Town

There is a small town in Logan County, West Virginia, called Man. It sits at the mouth of Buffalo Creek, where it meets the Guyandotte River, and has been a community since the early days of West Virginia statehood. Today it has a few hundred residents and is part of the coal country of southwestern Appalachian. But the town's name carries within it a family story that most of its residents may not know: Man is named after a Hinchman.

The Doctor-Politician of Logan County

Ulysses Hinchman was a practicing physician who settled in Logan County, West Virginia — one of the most remote and rugged counties in the state, carved out of the deep Appalachian hollows of the Guyandotte River valley. In the years immediately following West Virginia's creation as a state during the Civil War, Logan County needed professional men: doctors, administrators, community leaders.

Hinchman served all of these roles. He was the county's census taker, responsible for enumerating the population in those early years of statehood. He was the commissioner of school lands, overseeing the distribution and administration of land grants designated for public education. And from 1866 to 1869, he served as a member of the West Virginia House of Delegates, representing Logan County in the newly formed state legislature during the Reconstruction era — one of the most politically turbulent periods in American history.

The Town That Took His Name

The community at the mouth of Buffalo Creek was originally known as Buffalo City. At some point — the exact date is recorded in West Virginia place-name histories — the decision was made to rename it. According to West Virginia Place Names (Thomas, 1945), the community of Man "derived its name from the last syllable of the last name of Ulysses Hinchman."

It is an unusual form of commemoration: not the full name, not even the first name, but the last syllable of the last name. Whether this was a deliberate choice, a phonetic convenience, or a community's affectionate shorthand for a respected figure, the result is permanent. The town of Man, West Virginia, carries the Hinchman name encoded within it — the final three letters of a family name that stretches back to Norman England and crossed the Atlantic with the earliest settlers.

Ulysses Hinchman represents the broader pattern of Hinchman family settlement in Appalachian communities: professional men and women who brought medicine, law, education, and civic service to the mountains. The family that produced coal-country baseball players and Kentucky pioneers also produced a physician-legislator in the rugged hollows of Logan County who left his mark in the most literal way possible — in the name of a town that still stands today.