today Marion County, West Virginia. He was a great-grandson of Morgantown's founder Zackquill Morgan. Frank Pierpont was educated in a one-room schoolhouse and by his own reading. Pierpont became linked with the region's history for the rest of his life. After walking to Pennsylvania, he enrolled in and graduated from Allegheny College. Later, he taught school in Harrison County. Then he traveled and became an abolitionist after seeing slavery's abuses in Mississippi. He returned home to Fairmont, handled the family's tanning business, became active in the Methodist Church, and began studying law. He was admitted to the bar in 1841. In 1848, Pierpont became the local attorney for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Before entering politics, he also helped found Fairmont Male and Female Seminary, the forerunner to Fairmont State University. Political career Civil War An active supporter of Abraham Lincoln, Pierpont became more involved in politics as an outspoken opponent of Virginia's secession from the Union. When Virginia seceded and entered the war, delegates from the northwestern counties of Virginia, which refused to join the Confederacy, met at the Wheeling Convention. Declaring that their elected officials had abandoned their posts, a rump government was established in Wheeling, with Pierpont as the provisional Governor. Claiming to be the legitimate government of the entire Commonwealth of Virginia, the "Restored Government" drafted a new Virginia Constitution and sent representatives to the Union Congress. The Second Wheeling Convention met on June 11, 1861. On June 20, 1861, it unanimously elected Pierpont governor of the Restored Government of Virginia, with the recognition of President Lincoln. In 1862, Pierpont attended the Loyal War Governors' Conference in Altoona, Pennsylvania, organized by Pennsylvania Governor Andrew Gregg Curtin, which ultimately backed Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and the Union war effort. Pierpont was again elected governor for a four-year term by the legislature on May 28, 1863. Under Pierpont's leadership, the Wheeling government called for a popular vote on creating a new separate state. Despite a lack of overwhelming support and widespread fraud in the voting process, the Restored Government pressed the U.S. Congress for statehood, which also approved the issue. The new state took the name West Virginia and was admitted into the Union in 1863. A lifelong West Virginian, Pierpont had hoped to become the new state's first governor. However, the Lincoln administration was keen to ensure the continuity of the Restored Government was not disrupted and