David Hunter Strother (September 26, 1816 – March 8, 1888) was an American journalist, artist, brevet Brigadier General, innkeeper, politician and diplomat from West Virginia.

A Union topographer and nominal cavalry commander during the war, Strother rose to the rank of brevet Brigadier General of Volunteers, and afterward restructured the Virginia Military Institute, as well as serving as U.S. consul in Mexico (1879–1885).

Strother also spent a year (1832) at Jefferson College in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania,[4] After desultory studies in law and medicine, and a continued inability to obtain a position at West Point, now because of his father's lack of political clout in the Jacksonian era, Strother and friend John Ranson in 1835 took a 500-mile (805 km) round trip hike in the Blue Ridge and Appalachian mountains, down to Natural Bridge and Rockbridge County, Virginia, and back up through the Shenandoah Valley, which changed his outlook on life.

[5] In 1837–38, on the recommendation of Winchester's John Gadsby Chapman, Strother traveled to New York City to study painting under Samuel F. B. Morse, who later became more famous for inventing the telegraph.

Strother traveled along the Ohio River and in the Midwest in 1838–1839 (visiting cousins in Louisville, Kentucky, and St. Louis, Missouri, as well as painting various portraits in Indiana and Illinois).

Strother returned to the United States in the spring of 1843, unable to continue to Greece and Turkey because of his father's financial reverses and the lack of work for expatriate Americans in Europe.

[6] His father rebuilt the family's hotel in 1844–46, so it could serve 300–400 guests, including artists as well as politicians and society people, who could travel to Berkeley Springs on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (which reached Cumberland, Maryland, in 1844).

[10][11] Strother published in a variety of places before winning fame as both author and illustrator of a series of humorous travelogues which appeared in Harper's Monthly magazine.

Harper's Ferry was near his home, and he soon published an article about the flaming destruction of the armory and successful capture of the raiders by Virginia forces led by Lt. J. E. B. Stuart.

By March 1862 as West Virginia continued its drive toward statehood, Strother received a commission as captain in the Union Army and was assigned to assist General Nathaniel Banks in the Valley Campaign.

On June 12, 1864, Col. Strother was chief of staff to his distant cousin General David Hunter, a fervent abolitionist who led the Shenandoah Valley Division of the West Virginia Department as Union forces struck at Lexington and Lynchburg.

Strother sent a bronze statue of General George Washington off to Wheeling, considering it a trophy and indignant that it had adorned "a country whose inhabitants were striving to destroy a government which he founded.".

After his father's death in January 1862, the war limited occupancy by Southern guests (other than the unwelcome Stonewall Jackson who once used it as a base to shell the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad).

Harper's Monthly began publishing his illustrated Civil War memoirs in 1866, but discontinued the series after ten installments out of the 24 Strother planned (ending with his recollections of the Battle of Antietam).

Strother became one of the first writers to understand West Virginia's unique place in both wanting to preserve its natural beauty while also encouraging growth, both economic and industrial.