Source: HISTORY OF THE PAN-HANDLE OF WEST VIRGINIA 1879
Page 356

     CHARLES WELLS was born in Baltimore county , Maryland, April 6, 1745. He married Rachel Owings, December 27, 1764. She died May 17, 1783. He married for a second wife Elizabeth Prather, July 24, 1784.

     Mr. Wells was one of the early pioneers of Brooke county. He settled on Buffalo Creek, about two miles of the Pennsylvania line, north of the creek, in the year 1775. His brothers, William, Absalom, Caleb, and Amon all settled in the county about the same time. After his second marriage, he sold his land in Brooke county and moved to Tyler county, Virginias, where he purchased a large tract of river bottom land, and become wealthy in land and stock, giving his children farms, as they married and settled.

     Mr. Wells family became one of the most remarkable in Northwestern Virginia, for their number and stature as well as wealth and influence. He had by his first wife nine children, by his second wife he had eleven, making a family of twenty children, eleven daughters and nine sons. All these children grew to years of maturity and most of them married and raised large families. They principally all, settled in the Ohio valley and now with descendants, constitute the numerous families at Wellses, Russells, McCoys and others from Steubenville to Parkersburg, principally on the Virginia side of the river. One son Absalom and one daughter Mary Owings still reside in Brooke county. They all male and female grew to an exceeding large size, were athletic and healthy, their weight ranging from two hundred to two hundred and seventy five pounds. They were noted for their family friendship and a habit of visiting among themselves, often going in companies of ten to twenty and spending weeks in visiting from place to place among friends. It became a by-word among steamboat and river men, on seeing a company of men and women coming to the boat "there comes the big Wellses" They were known by all the boatmen, from Pittsburg to New Orleans,

     The beautiful bottom, where Sistersville now stands, was given by Mr. Wells, to his two daughters, who married two brothers, William and Joshua Russell and who afterwards laid out the town and called it Sistersville, in honor of the two sisters who owned the land.

     Mr. Wells represented Northwestern Virginia, in congress eight years, between 1789 and 1816.