John Henry Minor, retired Prince George supervisor, dies

After playing baseball in high school, John Henry Minor of Prince George County decided that a career in the minor leagues wouldn't let him afford a family. Nonetheless, he played on a team in the county until he was 55 and broke a rib sliding into second base. Two days later, he was back on his tractor.

He displayed the same kind of tenacity serving on the Prince George Board of Supervisors, including stints as chairman and vice chairman, from 1968 to 1975 and 1982 to 1995.

"When he saw concerns, he was diligent in following through with people one-on-one so they could get what they deserved from county government," said Prince George County Administrator John G. Kines Jr.

Mr. Minor, who championed real estate tax relief for the elderly and defended his county against annexation, died of complications of scleroderma Thursday at a Richmond acute-care hospital. He was 85.

The Prince George resident will be remembered at a rosary service today, Sunday, at 6:30 p.m. at the Hopewell Chapel of Nelsen Funeral Home.

A Mass of Christian burial will be said Monday at 10 a.m. at St. James Catholic Church, 510 W. Poythress St. in Hopewell, where he was a member for almost 60 years. Burial will be in Southlawn Memorial Park.

In the 1970s, Mr. Minor led an effort establishing a county ordinance allowing elderly residents to defer paying real estate taxes through their lifetimes until such time as their property would be sold, Kines said.

He pushed successfully to have a similar ordinance adopted by the General Assembly.

In March 1985, when Hopewell and Petersburg filed separate annexation suits against Prince George, Mr. Minor was in the vanguard of the effort to not allow any annexation of county land, Kines said.

During a 5½-year legal battle, Prince George became the first county to defeat annexation brought by two cities at the same time, Kines said.

Subsequently, the county filed for immunity from annexation in certain areas and was the first in Virginia to gain immunity from annexation through the legal process, Kines said.

"He was very, very instrumental in key areas," Kines said, as the supervisors established a county utility department, a centralized accounting department that became the county's finance department, an independent real estate assessment office and a police department independent of the sheriff's office. He pushed for building a replacement Prince George High School. The building was dedicated to him.

Born at home on a Prince George farm and one of five brothers, he harvested and planted with his father and was a mainstay helping his mother in the kitchen, where he learned to cook, said daughter Patricia Gunter of Ellicott City, Md.

He was 21 and Bernice Story was 17 when they married in 1946. They later moved to Petersburg, and Mr. Minor went to work as a millwright for Hercules Inc., repairing anything in the plant. He was millwright supervisor when he retired in 1982.

The couple purchased what became Minor Corner Grocery on state Route 156 between Hopewell and the Prince George County line in 1948 and ran the store until they sold it in the late 1960s.

Mrs. Minor died in June 2008.

In addition to his daughter, survivors include three grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
Contact Ellen Robertson at (804) 649-6115 or .