ANCESTORS LEAVE US INSPIRED, MOVED, EDUCATED BY EXAMPLE

There's an interesting footnote to my prospective service in the Missouri Senate, where I'll take the oath along with my colleagues at noon on January 6. My great-grandfather, who died 73 years ago this week and was buried in Benton on Christmas Eve, 1919, saw service in the same body. I'm tempted to say he served in the same seat, but not quite; of the ten counties involved in the two districts, two (Mississippi and Scott) are common to both.

William Hunter, my great-grandfather, was born in Mississippi County Missouri in 1848. He was educated at Jefferson College in Louisiana, Georgetown College in Kentucky, then briefly taught school before graduating from the Law School at Harvard University in 1874. He was admitted to the bar at Cambridge, Mass. before returning to this area, and was admitted to the bar at Cairo, Ill. and here in Missouri.

In 1876 he was elected prosecuting attorney of Scott County while living at Commerce, Missouri, then a thriving river town. It was also that year that he took a wife, the former Ella Walker of New Madrid. Some time in the next few years great-grandfather moved his family to the county seat of Benton, where he established a substantial home and reared his children and grandchildren. One of those grandchildren was my mother, who together with her brother and sisters, were all born in Benton on what was then known as "Hunter Hill."

Great-grandfather Hunter was, of course, a lifelong Democrat. In the 1884 senate race, he defeated Thomas Jefferson O'Neill Morrison, who appears to have been an interesting character himself. Morrison did not run as a Republican; the young GOP fielded no candidate in the overwhelmingly Democratic territory. Rather, Morrison ran on the Independent Democrat ticket. The Independent Democrats were those unreconstructed southerners who, after the Civil War, refused to take the required oath of allegiance to the federal government and the Union.

T.J. O'Neill Morrison is remembered in history for other distinctions. At the time he and my great-grandfather faced off in the general election, Morrison was the powerful senate President Pro Tem. In that position, Sen. Morrison had been instrumental in the decision to locate the Normal School (forerunner of Southeast Missouri State University) in Cape Girardeau.

The then-23rd district my great-grandfather represented encompassed the entire Bootheel, from Scott County on the north through Mississippi County to New Madrid, Stoddard, Pemiscot and Dunklin Counties. Great-grandfather practiced an early form of term limitation: In 1888, he declined to stand for reelection, and never served again in public office, completing his official public service at age 40.

Before his death at age 71 he had practically abandoned the practice of law to manage his extensive landholdings. During the agricultural depression of the '20s and '30s that followed his death, the family unable to pay estate taxes and other levies lost almost all the ground he had accumulated.

Interestingly, a colleague of his was his fellow Democrat, the senator from Cape Girardeau County, who represented five counties from Cape north to Ste. Genevieve. Sen. R.B. Oliver, first elected in 1882, was the great-grandfather of Cape Girardeau attorney John L. Oliver Jr., vice chairman of the Missouri Highway and Transportation Commission. Sen. Oliver served in the senate for more than three decades.

Together, the two men were responsible for much of the early drainage of swamplands throughout Southeast Missouri. Today, for the "crime" of making incredibly productive farmland out of vast swamp acreage, both men would be hounded and face criminal prosecution, fines, jail and ruin at the hands of the Fish and Wildlife Service, the EPA, the Army Corps of Engineers, the state Department of Natural Resources and the federal prosecutors.