Early Life
Harry Flood Byrd was born in Martinsburg, West Virginia in 1887 and moved with his parents, Richard Evelyn Byrd, Sr. and Eleanor Bolling (Flood), to Winchester, Virginia the same year. Byrd was a descendant of one of the First Families of Virginia; his ancestors included William Byrd II of Westover Plantation, who established Richmond, and Pocahontas.
Harry Flood Byrd was the brother of famed aviator Richard Evelyn Byrd. He was a nephew of Henry De La Warr Flood, who served in the House of Representatives in the U.S. Congress from Appomattox County, Virginia from 1901 to 1921 and Joel West Flood, also of Appomattox County. Joel Flood served as Commonwealth Attorney of Appomattox County from 1919 to 1932, served in the U.S. Congress to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Henry St. George Tucker in 1932. He became a long-time Federal Court Judge of the Fifth Judiciary Circuit (based in Richmond), serving from 1940 to 1964.
Young Harry Byrd's father was a wealthy apple grower in the Shenandoah Valley and publisher of the Winchester Star newspaper. He attended the public schools and Shenandoah Valley Academy in Winchester.
One of his biographers, Alden Hatch, has noted that, having been born only twenty-two years after the end of the American Civil War, he grew up in an era when "the Shenandoah Valley was still a place of genteel poverty ... Harry Byrd never lacked food, but he had no money for luxuries. No one had any money. If a man got into debt, there was small chance of getting out of it."
Even worse in Byrd's eyes was the dilemma of the state itself, which was also heavily in debt during Byrd's youth. Virginia beginning in 1816 had taken on debt to help finance many internal public improvements through the Virginia Board of Public Works before the Civil War. Some of these improvements, which were primarily canals, turnpikes, and railroads, had been destroyed during the War, although the debt remained. Others had been made in the former portion of the state that separated to form the new State of West Virginia. For several decades thereafter, Virginia and West Virginia disputed the new state's share of the Virginia government's debt, which had grown to $47 million by 1871 (immediately after the Reconstruction period).
The issue was finally settled in 1915, when the United States Supreme Court ruled that West Virginia owed Virginia $12,393,929.50. (Commonwealth of Virginia v. State of West Virginia, 238 U.S. 202 (1915)). West Virginia paid the final installment of this sum in 1939. However, the issue of Virginia's public debt was far from resolved during Byrd's formative years.
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