Biography of Lloyd M. STEMPLE, Preston County, West Virginia This file was submitted by Cheryl McCollum, E-mail address: This file may be freely copied by individuals and non-profit organizations for their private use. All other rights reserved. Any other use, including publication, storage in a retrieval system, or transmission by electronic, mechanical, or other means requires the written approval of the file's author. This file is part of the WVGenWeb Archives. If you arrived here inside a frame or from a link from somewhere else, our front door is at http://www.usgwarchives.org/wv/wvfiles.htm LLOYD M. STEMPLE is manager of the Service Stores Corporation at Bretz in Preston County, is also postmaster of that village, and is a business man whose responsibilities have been steadily growing during the past fourteen years. He was born near Aurora, Preston County, May 11, 1882. He is a direct descendant of Godfrey Stemple, who settled near Aurora in the early years of the nineteenth century, spent his remaining years as a farmer and is buried in that locality, and a large number of his descendants are still found over Preston County. Lloyd M. Stemple grew up on a farm, attended the public schools, and either through his own efforts or his earnings supplied himself with the equivalent of a liberal education. At the age of twenty-two he began teaching, a vocation he followed altogether for some five or six years. In the meantime he took the course in the preparatory school for teachers at Keyser, and in the summer of 1908 graduated from the Mountain State Business College at Parkersburg. Following that he became stenographer and claim clerk in the coal billing office of the Baltimore & Ohio Railway Company at Fairmont. West Virginia. Fourteen months later he resigned and returned to Austen in Preston County, where he taught another term of school and in the spring of 1910 became a clerk in the Austen Coal & Coke company's general store. After about a year he was transferred to the office of chief clerk to the auditor of the company. With the collapse of the coal industry in 1913 he left the service of the Austen company and went south to Stapleton, Alabama, where he tried farming and merchandising. The conditions of the climate were adverse to his health, and after about a year he returned to his home state and formed a connection with the West Virginia Mercantile Company at Kingwood. This company subsequently sent him to Bretz, where he has been store manager ever since. The West Virginia Mercantile company sold its interests to the Bethlehem Steel Company, and the Service Stores corporation is now a subsidiary of the Bethlehem Steel Company. Mr. Stemple's work as manager was unaffected by the change in ownership. He was appointed postmaster of Bretz, August 18, 1916, succeeding Postmaster H. B. Jackson. Mr. Stemple has usually voted as a republican, though most of the Stemples have been democrats. He and Mrs. Stemple are members of the Methodist Episcopal Church. At Cumberland, Maryland, February 22, 1907, he married Miss Daisy A. Hovatter, a native of Preston County. Many of the Hovatter family lived around Fairmont, and her parents, A. J. and Helen (Pell) Hovatter, now live near Manown. Mrs. Stemple completed her education in the summer normal at Terra Alta, and taught for several years before her marriage, teaching in the towns of Austen and Newburg and in the village schools of Bretz. Mr. and Mrs. Stemple have two children, Ethel Muriel and Max Lloyd.