Robert T. Oney

From Appomattox County, he mustered as Private in the Bedford Light Artillery on 16 July 1861 in Jamestown, VA.

He was wounded by piece of shell to the thigh and captured in action at Sharpsburg on 17 September 1862.

He was treated at the Locust Spring Hospital, Sharpsburg, paroled 27 September but remained in US Army hospitals to at least 27 April 1863. He was confined at Fort McHenry, MD to 22 May, then released to a hospital in Petersburg, VA. He was hospitalized in Liberty, VA in November 1863, then detailed to the Clothing Depot and Subsistence Departments in Richmond to at least January 1865.

He was in business in Bedford to 1868, when he moved to Charleston, WV, and was clerk in the Kanawha Valley Bank there. In 1873 he moved to Huntington, WV, and was cashier of the Huntington Bank when it was robbed by four men on 6 September 1875. It is likely they were members of Jesse James' gang, and that two of the men were Cole Younger and Frank James. Oney returned to Charleston in 1883 and was cashier and on the board of the Kanawha Valley Bank, and was later officer or director of several other business in town. He was granted several US patents, including one for a coding/cypher machine (1882) and for a "pedo electric trolley" (1895). He was living in "distant Idaho" at the time of his death, and was returned to his native Bedford for burial.

Service and other details from Marilyn Brewer Koleszar's Ashland, Bedford, and Taylor Virginia Light Artillery (roster, 1994) via the Historical Data Systems database. Personal details from a sketch in History of the Great Kanawha Valley (1891). Death detail from a death notice in the Richmond Times-Dispatch of 3 September 1908. His gravesite is on Findagrave. One of the best narrations of the James Gang's "Huntington Raid" is from Ted P. Yeatman in Frank and Jesse James: The Story Behind the Legend (2000).

02/08/1845; Bedford, VA

08/25/1908; Bedford, VA; burial in Longwood Cemetery, Bedford, VA