George Clendenin was born in 1746 in Ireland, married Jemima McNeill, and died in 1797. The town was named for him. He owned land and helped settle and establish Kanawha County, while Charleston was named for his father, Charles. A Virginia militia officer, he fought in the Battle of Point Pleasant. As a county official, he served Greenbrier County from 1781 to 1789 and represented Kanawha in the Virginia legislature in 1791 and from 1793 to 1795. A land speculator, he owned some 21,000 acres in the region. The area at the confluence of the Elk and Big Sandy rivers was settled in the late 1700s, and the town was laid out in 1877 by W. Chilton, incorporated in May 1904, and first led by mayor L. V. Koontz. After 1893 its main industries were timber, coal, oil, gas, and railroads. South at Falling Rock Creek was the first refinery to process coal into cannel oil, and Carbide and Carbon Chemical Corporation, later Union Carbide, built its first plant here in the 1920s.