In 1890, General Christopher Columbus Andrews edited and published by subscription an oversized, 800 page tome, "History of St. Paul, Minn." It includes a long chapter of biographical sketches of about 265 members of the city's legal community compiled by Hiram F. Stevens, a local lawyer.
In these profiles, which were usually only three or four sentences long, we see the transformation of the city bar in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The founding generation of settler-lawyers was being replaced by younger lawyers, most of whom were immigrants from other states and countries, many college educated, some already members of the bar of their native states, every one ambitious. If these lawyers changed the bar, they also changed the city by their engagement in business, churches, politics, social organizations and other aspects of civic life.
Andrews's "History" has a second part of short biographies of major subscribers, including twenty-one members of the local legal community: Hiram F. Stevens, Willis A. Gorman, James H. Davidson, Charles Nash Bell, Charles E. Flandrau, Walter H. Sanborn, William Pitt Clough, John Espy, Henry J. Horn, Charles D. Kerr, George L. Otis, William W. Erwin, Warren H. Mead, George L. Becker, Jacob Mainzer, Henry Hale, Edward Simonton, Charles D. Gilfillan, Wescott Wilkin, John B. Sanborn and William P. Murray. Several of these men were Civil War veterans, one (Wilkin) was serving on the bench, another (Flandrau) was a former judge, and two were future judges (Walter Sanborn and Charles D. Kerr).
This article consist of Stevens's chapter plus the lengthy biographies (or autobiographies in some cases) of the major lawyer-subscribers to General Andrews's city history.
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