Walker - Alexander - Montgomery InGenWeb Project

Alexander Stuart Walker, lawyer and judge, the son of John Cowan and Virginia (Stuart) Walker, was born near Brownsburg, Rockbridge County, Virginia, on August 18, 1826. The family moved to Crawfordsville, Indiana, in 1837. Walker attended Wabash College and South Hanover College, Indiana, from which he graduated in 1850. He read law and taught school in Shelby County, Kentucky, until 1852, when he moved to Texas and began to teach school near Houston. He studied law with David G. Burnet and James Pinckney Henderson and in January 1853 was licensed to practice law. In July 1853 he moved to Georgetown, where he was appointed district clerk by Robert E. B. Baylor. In 1854 Walker returned to South Hanover College to take his M.A. degree. He was elected attorney for the Seventeenth Judicial District in 1858. While serving in the Confederate Army in 1862, he was elected district judge; he remained in office until removed by United States military forces in 1865 as an "impediment to Reconstruction." In 1865 he moved to Austin, where he planned the Democratic Statesman and became its first editor in chief in 1873. He practiced law in Austin in association with various partners, including Alexander W. Terrell,qv until 1879, when he was appointed to the Commission of Appeals by Oran M. Roberts. Walker was judge of the Sixteenth Judicial District from 1880 to 1884 and associate justice of the Texas Supreme Court from March 1888 to January 1, 1889. In June 1889 he was appointed reporter for the court. Walker was married first to Anna Jane Wilbarger of Georgetown, and they had two children. After her death he married Mrs. Mary Maxwell Bowers. He was a Mason, a Presbyterian, and a Democrat. He died in Austin on August 14, 1896, and was buried in Oakwood Cemetery.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Austin Statesman, August 16, 1896. Biographical Encyclopedia of Texas (New York: Southern, 1880). Harbert Davenport, History of the Supreme Court of the State of Texas (Austin: Southern Law Book Publishers, 1917). Frank W. Johnson, A History of Texas and Texans (5 vols., ed. E. C. Barker and E. W. Winkler [Chicago and New York: American Historical Society, 1914; rpt. 1916]). James D. Lynch, The Bench and Bar of Texas (St. Louis, 1885).