Terry Reed’s book, Compromised, exposes what was happening in Arkansas at the time through the eyes of the author, Reed, who in the fall of 1985 had just moved his family to Arkansas to set up a CIA proprietary business with Seth Ward’s company. He also had contact with “Robert Johnson,” who, he was informed, was “SAT’s General Counsel, but also ‘a stockholder’ in SAT, and one of those ‘Yale lawyer types’ who had lately started running the Agency.” Terry Reed and John Cummings, Compromised: Clinton, Bush and The CIA (New York, NY: S.P.I. Books, /Shapolsky Publishers, Inc, 1994), p. 195.
The Seth Ward Ancestry in Virginia
Seth Ward's great grandfather, Samuel Goode Ward (1818-1885), was the youngest son of in a long line of Seth Wards born around Lynchburg, Virginia, dating back to before the American Revolution. His mother was a Goode, whose family was detailed in a genealogical study by G. Brown Goode, called the Virginia Cousins: Ancestry and Posterity of John Goode, published in 1897, which I was able to read through Ancestry.com.
Samuel Goode Ward, Pioneer, and Wives
Samuel Goode Ward had left Virginia for Tennessee, where Samuel's mother, born Martha Norvell, died at Clarksville, Montgomery County, Tennessee in 1848, seven years after Samuel married Lucinda Jane Dabney, who died in Clarksville in 1843. Samuel moved on after his mother's death and settled down on a farm in Leon County, Texas--a place called Middleton, which is still rural today.
His second wife, Sarah Anne Wyche, was twice widowed and already had two children when she gave birth to the future Methodist Bishop there in November 1858. He was given the hereditary name of Seth by his father, and ordained in 1881 as a country preacher without the benefit of college. We find no evidence his parents ever ventured outside their own farm after their years of travel that brought them to Texas.
 |
| Fort Worth Star Telegram |
The lives of family members stemming from Bishop Seth Ward had for years been defined by the Methodist Church. Even the wife he chose--Margaret Elizabeth South, usually known as Bettie--came from that Methodist orbit. Her father, Rev. Walter Smith South, had left Kentucky for the Texas mission field slightly before Samuel Goode Ward arrived from Tennessee. Rev. South's path crossed with Seth's in Bryan, where Seth and Bettie met and were married in 1886.
More on Rev. Walter Smith South
We discovered from searching through old books about Texas Methodist ministers (three books by Phelan, Macun) that an older brother, Henry Washington South, had been transferred from the Methodist conference in Louisville, Kentucky to Galveston in 1855 and that Walter S. South was admitted in 1856 by the Texas conference on a trial basis. It appears that their widowed mother, Margaret Donan South followed them and died in Anderson County, Texas in 1865.
In 1861 Rev. Walter Smith South was married in Kosse, Texas (east of Waco) to Mary Ann Burleson, whose family had come to Texas from Mississippi. The groom's brother Henry South performed the ceremony. Although Henry returned to Kentucky years before his death, Rev. Walter South continued living in Texas. He died in Bryan in 1897, and his wife followed in 1902. An article in the Beaumont Enterprise in 1960 claimed Mary Ann Burleson South's brother was Rufus Columbus Burleson, Baptist president of Baylor University for almost a half century. The college was established first at Independence in 1845 and later moved to Waco. We have not been able to confirm they were siblings, although the same newspaper did state that Mary Ann had been a teacher at Baylor Female College at Independence at one time.
The 1880 census shows Rev. South and his entire family living in Bryan:
Walter S. South 55
Mary A. South 44
Lida South 17
Betty South 15
Horace W. South 13
Henry South 11
James T. South 4
A&M University was established nearby, around a town first called "College." Horace W. South later became a professor there after attending Allen Academy, located relatively close to the original Austin's Colony. Towns like Brenham and Bryan were in the vicinity of "the birthplace of Texas," where drafters of the Texas Constitution had met in 1836 to declare Texas an independent republic. The area had thrived until the civil war, but the decline of the former capital was mostly due to its refusal to pay to connect to the railroad that moved through the area--the same railroad for which Charles Edward Hull would be employed.
Charles Hull in 1883 married Rev. South's eldest daughter, Ellen "Lyda" South, born in Bryan in 1862. Charles had arrived from Ohio with his parents in 1870. Charles' father, Elias Hutchens Hull, sometimes referred to as "Professor," was a patent attorney who, before he came to Brazos County from Ohio had acquired at least two patents in his name. One was for a winding mechanism for a watch, which he sold to Elgin Watch Co. for a significant amount before 1870. That was the year the Hulls relocated to Texas to be near the new mechanical college. (Elias died in 1899 at Henrietta in Clay County. It is unknown why he was there.) His widow, Minerva Jane, lived until 1915, and her history is detailed in an obituary, which indicates she had moved from Bryan to Navasota and then to Houston while making her home with her son Charles, who began his career with that same railroad, Houston and Texas Central, as a telegraph operator and advanced to the main office in Navasota and later in Houston. (However, when he died in 1927, he had been living in Clifton, Arizona for several years, working for the Southern Pacific Railroad, which operated through a lease of Eastern Arizona's rail line near copper mines.)
Charles and Lyda Hull had one son, Burton Elias Hull, and three daughters. Burton became quite wealthy, as we will explain below.
Betty South Ward
Rev. South's second daughter, Margaret Elizabeth "Betty" South, was born in 1865 in nearby Millican, and was destined to marry Methodist Bishop Seth Ward, profiled in the Southern Methodist Handbook in 1883 as follows:
By 1900, the youngest of Betty South Ward's three brothers, James T. (called J. Thomas or Jim Tom) was a journalist in Galveston as a correspondent for the Houston Post. Possibly it was the massive 1900 hurricane in Galveston that caused him to move to New York, where he worked as a proofreader and never married. The eldest brother, Henry Tiebar South, was a hopeless lunatic, committed most of his life in Austin's state hospital. It was the middle brother, Horace Walter South, who was a professor at A&M located at "College" (later College Station).
South and Pritchett branch
Betty's brother, Horace Walter South, obtained a passport in 1918, showing he was working as a teacher in Houston but needed to travel abroad for the National War Work Council of the YMCA Army Services
married Jessie Lee Pritchett after she arrived in Austin with her parents from Missouri. Her father, William Ira Pritchett, had connections to the Pritchett School Institute established by his father in 1866. William followed his adult sons to Texas once they became part of the nepotistic Texas educational establishment.
--in Austin, San Marcos and Huntsville. Jessie's brother, Henry Carr Pritchett, who died in 1908 in Huntsville, Texas, where he had been president of the Sam Houston State Teachers College for many years. Methodist Bishop Seth Ward, who delivered the funeral sermon, was the brother-in-law of Horace Walter South, Jessie's husband.
Seth continued traveling as a circuit preacher after their marriage. The best evidence is the birth of their children. Seth Walter Ward was born in Galveston in 1888. Annie Byrd Ward was born in Huntsville in 1891. The youngest, Emmett Goode Ward arrived in 1905 in Nashville, Tennessee, where his father was installed as a Methodist Bishop, who would play a part in foreign mission work thereafter.
Only four years later Bishop Ward died in Japan while at a conference in Kobe. By then the Wards had moved back to Texas, where Betty South Ward would continue rearing her children in Houston. The eldest, Seth Walter Ward then became the partial support of the late Bishop's wife and his two younger siblings who lived in a large house on the south side of Houston (Travis and Anita streets) and took in boarders.
Seth Walter worked as an advertising director for the E.S. Levy department store in Houston and in 1912 married 18-year-old Helene Irma Curd, whose family had recently returned to Texas from Indiana. The ceremony was performed by a Methodist minister named Horace Morland Whaling, Jr., his brother-in-law, who had married Annie Byrd Ward the previous year at St. Paul's Methodist Church in Houston. The Wards had been members there even before Bishop Seth Ward left for Japan, and he was one of the ministers on the day the church opened in January 1909. The new building had been built with funds raised by Jesse Jones and his uncle's family. Jones became a Methodist in his adult life, and was close friends with Bishop A. Frank Smith, who performed the funeral service many years later (1960) for the Bishop's wife and a belated service for Seth Walter Ward, who died in 1958.
From Galveston, Texas to Little Rock, Arkansas
When WWI came in 1917, Seth W. and Irma were living in Galveston with two children: Margaret Ann, who had been born in 1914, and Frances Elizabeth "Bette" in 1916. Their son, Seth (NMI) Ward, was born in 1920 after they moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, where Seth W. handled advertising for M.M. Cohn. Morris M. Cohn, who owned the store, had been a member of the Board of Trade of Little Rock with attorney Uriah Rose since the previous century and attended Rose's funeral in 1913. We will return to Rose's law firm subsequently.
When young Seth signed up for the draft in 1942, he was working as an "attendant" at Healey & Roth (funeral home) at 815 Main St. in Little Rock. But his future would not be limited by that brief occupation. He quickly joined up for the war effort and became a U.S. Marine, sent to Pensacola Naval Air Base to train as a pilot. As a 1st Lieutenant in the Marine Corps, Special Services, he was in Guam in 1946 and was promoted to Captain in 1948 before being sent to the Naval Air Station Reserve Training Center in Glenville, Illinois.
Somehow during that time he met Yvonne Danielson of Denver, Colorado, a recent graduate of Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio. They married in February 1949, and she moved to Glenville for his final year of training. Their first child, Suzanna, was born in Lake Forest, Illinois in December that year.
Shortly after their wedding they visited his parents, the long-time advertising director and his reporter wife, who were then living at Rollover Pass on the Bolivar Peninsula, just east of Galveston where their married life had begun.
Along for that visit was Seth's older sister Margaret, who was married to her second husband, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps, Edward Thompson Hancock, the son of Charlotte "Lottie" Thompson, whose father was Edward Grady Thompson, a wealthy member of Little Rock society for many years before his death in 1921, as we will subsequently discuss.
The Hancocks had recently returned from two years in China on their way to Washington, D.C. Edward's boss was Gen. Frank Dow Merrill who commanded a group known as "Merrill's Marauders." Her marriage to him had taken place shortly after her divorce in September 1940 from Robert Irvine. Immigration records at Ancestry show Margaret and her daughter Ann Irvine Hancock sailing from Panama to New Orleans on 14 Feb 1942. A second daughter, Kobbe, was born in July 1943, so presumably she returned to Panama after a short vacation.
 |
| Beaumont Journal -- Thu, Dec 12, 1946 ·Page 6 |
Lt. Col. Edward Thompson Hancock, born in Little Rock in 1913, had an intriguing family connection to members of
Little Rock's Rose
Law Firm through his mother, Charlotte "Lottie" Thompson, who had previously married a Chicago dentist named James Everett Hancock Jr. in 1908. Much older than his new wife, Dr. Hancock relocated his dental practice to Little Rock before his son was born.
In 1906 Lottie had eloped with 23-year-old George Danaher, who would become noted for racing cars in 1910. Her father, E.G. Thompson, was not happy, and, shortly after her surprise wedding, "deputized" Jerry South of Mountain Home, Baxter County, Arkansas, to retrieve her at the train station and dispatch her to Paris. "Deputy" South put his wife Ellen, daughter of the eminent Judge Thomas Frazier South of Kentucky, in charge of chaperoning her in Europe for a year or so. Ellen was assisted by one of her sisters, who had founded a girls school in Houston in 1899 called The Misses Hargis' School.
Here we should note that Seth Walter Ward's mother, Margaret "Betty" South, was the daughter of Rev. Walter Smith South, born in 1824 in Hardin County, Kentucky, after his father, William South, had moved west from the eastern seaboard, probably Virginia or Maryland--the same place the Ward family originated in America. His father William was listed in Hardin County as early as 1802, the year he married Margaret Donan in Breckinridge. His grave indicates he died in 1849 in Hardin County.
The following year William's widow was living with daughter, Rebecca South Needham, her husband Parkman S. Needham, and their five (ten years later there would be nine) children. Younger brother, Walter Smith South had moved to nearby Breckinridge County and was working as a school teacher. The Souths were ardent Methodists, as were the Needhams.
Intriguingly however, the Excelsior Collegiate Institute in Jett, Kentucky had been founded by James Knox Polk South and his wife Eudora Lindsay
Traveling under her new married name, Lottie's companions consisted of two daughters of Judge Thomas F. Hargis, Chief Judge in Carlisle, Kentucky until his death in 1903. One daughter married Jerry South and became Ellen Chappell Hargis South. Another, Miss Mary Garnett Hargi,s had a few years earlier moved from Kentucky to Houston, Texas to establish a school with two other sisters--Ann and
and Katherine Nash, possibly a student of the school.
Called "Kittie," she was the daughter of William Rufus Nash of Brazoria County as well as Houston, Texas. The school at 1215 Main Street was only a few blocks from their first home on LaBranch at the time.
In 1905 the school moved to Woodbury, N.J. and also had an address in Paris, France. We know their names because of an application all four ladies made to the consulate in Athens, Greece to obtain an extended passport to travel into Turkey.
Jerry Curtis South, at the time of his wedding to Ellen Chappell Hargis in 1898, was a soldier in Company M of Arkansas' second volunteers, as well as president pro tem of the Arkansas state senate and lieutenant governor. A member of the Arkansas State Legislature since 1891, he continued in that role for a total of ten years, ending in 1901. During that time he was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention from Arkansas every four years from 1892 through 1912.
The Souths moved to Washington, D.C. in 1912 where Jerry was appointed Chief Clerk of the House of Representatives during Woodrow Wilson's administration. Ellen's son, Jerry Curtis South, Jr., not yet born during her long chaperonage of the flighty Lottie Thompson, but was born in 1909 after the ladies returned home. Later he became a Real Admiral, United States Navy.
Lottie's father was president of the Citizens' Bank in Little Rock, which he and his brother, William J. Thompson--said at the time of his death in 1901 to have been the wealthiest man in Little Rock--had founded.
After Dr. Hancock, the dentist, died in Chicago on July 2, 1920, his widow (Edward's mother) married Frank G. Malone of New York on September 10, 1921. I could find no obituary for the late Dr. Hancock, who allegedly had an interest in the American Bank of Commerce and Trust Co. in Little Rock, and found only one article connecting him to the bank. About Malone I found nothing.
Seth was then assigned to Dallas, Texas, and the couple lived briefly with Seth's aunt Annie Byrd Ward and her husband, Rev. Horace Morland Whaling, a Methodist minister like his grandfather, who was a professor at Southern Methodist University.
The Whalings had several eminent children of their own who had recently reached adulthood.
Rose Law Firm
Rose, Hemingway & Rose had merged with another firm in 1905 to become Rose, Hemingway, Cantrell & Loughborough.
 |
| Directory listing in 1937 |
Today the website of the Rose Law Firm states that in 1865:
“Rose” was added to the partnership name in recognition of the addition of U.M. Rose, who was a student of history, science, philosophy, and literature, as well as an accomplished lawyer and linguist. As one of the founders of the American Bar Association, U.M. Rose was elected its president in 1900. President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Rose the United States representative to the Second Hague Peace Conference in 1902. His accomplishments and contributions to his country were recognized by the placement of his statue in Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol. U.M. Rose died on August 12, 1913. In 1958, United States Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote: “In my early years at the bar, U.M. Rose was one of the luminaries of our profession – not merely a very distinguished practitioner but a highly cultivated, philosophic student of civilization and of the role of law and the lawyers in the progress of civilization. Mr. Rose inspired me in my formative years as a lawyer.”
U.M. Rose’s son, George B. Rose, joined the partnership in 1881 and brought to it his photographic memory, command of six foreign languages, and passion for art. He was the author of the book titled Renaissance Masters. George B. Rose practiced until his death in 1943 at the age of 82.
Wilson E. Hemingway resigned as a justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court in 1893 to become a partner in the firm of Rose, Hemingway and Rose.
 |
| Municipal Bonds |
During its second century, Rose Law Firm continued to add lawyers of extraordinary intelligence, integrity and ingenuity such as Dedrick Cantrell (1905-1943), J. Fairfax Loughborough (1905-1945), Archie F. House (1925-1969), Harry E. Meek (1932-1969), George Rose Smith (1933-1948) and two Rhodes Scholars, William N. Nash (1931-1980) and J. Gaston Williamson (1949-1989).
Meek was the principal author of many of the banking, commercial, and inheritance laws of Arkansas. Nash, a former Dean of the Arkansas Law School, became an authority in municipal finance and authored many legislative proposals including the establishment of the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission and constitutional amendments relating to industrial finance.
George Rose Smith, the grandson of U.M. Rose, was elected to the Arkansas Supreme Court in 1948 and thereafter became its longest-serving justice. Gaston Williamson joined the firm in 1949 and became the preeminent authority on inheritance and estate planning in the state of Arkansas. He was elected President of the Arkansas Bar Association in 1968.Although the name of the firm has changed a number of times since 1820, the firm has retained the “Rose” in its name since 1865. In 1980, the firm changed its name for the last time to “Rose Law Firm, a Professional Association.”
