Herb Snyder's public life stretched from a Jefferson County commission seat to four terms in the West Virginia Senate, with an environmental chemistry laboratory and a restored Shenandoah Junction farm anchoring him in the community he represented. Snyder, a Democratic legislator known for two distinct periods of Senate service, died on August 3, 2026. He was 72.

Born Herbert Spohn Snyder in Winchester, Virginia, on September 7, 1953, he was the son of Bernard Snyder and Gladys Graves Snyder. His family's notice traced an early line of service through Troop 39 in Ranson, where he became an Eagle Scout. In 1971, he traveled to Tokyo as a Scout leader at the World Scout Jamboree. He graduated from Shepherdstown High School the next year.

Snyder stayed close to the Eastern Panhandle as he built both his profession and his home. He earned a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from Shepherd College in 1977, a credential also recorded in the West Virginia Legislature. He went on to open Hydrochem Laboratories in Shenandoah Junction and operated the business for nearly four decades. In 1979, he bought Wildwood Farm and restored its historic house and property. The Melvin T. Strider Colonial Funeral Home said he was the sixth generation of Snyders to live in Jefferson County.

That deep local footing became the base for a long public career. Snyder won election to the Jefferson County Commission in 1990 and served for six years. He then represented the Eastern Panhandle in the state Senate from 1997 to 2005 and from 2009 to 2017, four terms divided by a four-year interval. The unusual two-part arc gave his Senate career the rhythm of a return rather than a single uninterrupted climb.

Inside the Legislature, Snyder moved from committee work into leadership. He served as vice chair of the Judiciary Committee and chaired the Government Organization Committee. In January 2013, the Senate president formally reappointed him to the latter post, placing him among the chamber's major committee chairs. His assignments joined the practical concerns of regulation and public administration to the local perspective of a chemist and small business owner.

The work also reached beyond committee rooms. At the 2014 Governor's Arts Awards, Snyder received a Lifetime Achievement Award for legislative leadership in the arts. The West Virginia Culture Center credited him with support for restoring the Roundhouse in Martinsburg, promoting community arts groups and backing the West Virginia Juried Exhibition in Martinsburg. Those projects placed state policy in service of recognizable Eastern Panhandle institutions.

When Snyder announced in 2015 that he would not seek another Senate term, he framed the decision as a return home and a continuation of civic work. "I have a passion for public service," he told the West Virginia Press Association in a telephone interview. He completed his term in 2017, closing 16 years in the Senate after the earlier six years of county office.

Snyder's wife, Stephanie Shaffer Snyder, died before him. His family's notice named his children, a brother, six grandchildren and one great-grandchild among those surviving him. The institutions attached to his name remain unusually concrete: the laboratory he built, Wildwood Farm, the Roundhouse and community arts programs he championed, and 16 years of Senate work for the Eastern Panhandle. Together they map a life repeatedly directed back toward Jefferson County and the people who shared it.