General Ruffner became widowed and he and his second wife Viola (née Knapp) Ruffner (1820–1904), a schoolteacher whom he married in 1843, are remembered for employing a young Booker T. Washington as a houseboy in the years shortly after Emancipation.
She played a role in the personal development of Booker T. Washington, who worked in their household as a teenager after Emancipation.
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