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WASHINGTON E. HUDSON
Vol. 3, p. 960
Book has photo

The State of Oklahoma has been signally favored in calling to her
standard men of high professional attainments, sterling character and
great civic loyalty in making up the personnel of the bench and bar
of this vigorous new commonwealth, and he whose name initiates this
paragraph had achieved splendid success and prestige in his
profession prior to coming to Oklahoma, where he has found ample
opportunities for broadening the scope and importance of his
achievement and where he has impregnable vantage-ground as one of the
really representative members of the Oklahoma bar. He has been in a
significant sense the artificer of his own fortunes, has overcome
many seemingly insuperable obstacles in pressing forward to the goal
of his ambition, and aside from the work of his chosen vocation he
has proved himself a most loyal and progressive citizen, his place in
popular confidence and esteem being indicated in his election as
representative of Tulsa County, one of the most important in the
state, to the Fifth Oklahoma Legislature, in which he has made a
record of service that fully justified the preferment thus accorded
him. He is engaged in the general practice of law in the City of
Tulsa and is an influential figure in the ranks of the local
contingent of the democratic party.

At an historical spot known as Neeley's Bend, in Davidson County,
Tennessee, Washington E. HUDSON was born on the 8th of October, 1868,
and he thus came into the world only a short time after the close of
the Civil war, which had brought disaster and untold depression to
his native state and other commonwealths of the South. He is a scion
of a family that was founded in America in the colonial era of our
national history, the original progenitor of the Hudson line having
immigrated from England and representatives of the name having been
patriot soldiers in the Continental line in the War of the
Revolution. Mr. Hudson is a son of Horatio and Nannie Hudson, who
were natives of Kentucky and who were numbered among the first
settlers at Neeley's Bend, Tennessee, where the father died in 1882,
leaving his widow and three children, of whom Washington E., of this
review, was the eldest, his age at the time having been fourteen
years. The mother eventually contracted a second marriage and of the
children of the first union Washington E. is now the only survivor,
his brother, Isaac, having died at the age of twenty-seven years and
his sister, Mary, at the age of twenty-five years. The mother's death
occurred in 1911, and the only surviving child of her second marriage
is Mrs. Herbert TALBOT, a resident of Guthrie, Kentucky.

A lad of fourteen years at the time of his fathers death, Washington
E. Hudson early gained fellowship with measurable adversity and was
called upon to assume heavy responsibilities, especially in
connection with the work and management of the homestead farm, which
was somewhat encumbered with debt. He was ambitious to acquire an
education, but laudable as this desire was he made the same secondary
to the duty which devolved upon him in aiding his widowed mother and
the two younger children, and his first strenuous work was to pay the
financial obligations which his father had left. After this end had
been achieved he entered the Woolwine Training School at Nashville,
Tennessee, and after there continuing his studies one year he was
matriculated in the South Kentucky College, at Hopkinsville,
Kentucky, in which he completed the regular four years' course in two
years and in which he graduated on the 8th of June, 1890, with the
degree of Bachelor of Arts. At the Vanderbilt University, Nashville,
Tennessee, he became actively affiliated with the Sigma Epsilon Alpha
fraternity. Soon after graduation Mr. Hudson entered the office of
George K. WHITWORTH, clerk of the chancery court at Nashville,
Tennessee, where later he began the study of law in the office of the
firm of DEMOSS & MALONE. In the following autumn he entered the law
department of Vanderbilt University, in the same city and his
assiduity and remarkable mental powers enabled him to complete in one
year a prescribed curriculum that ordinarily demanded three years of
application. He was graduated in June, 1892, with the degree of
Bachelor of Laws, and, which is virtually attendant, admission to the
bar of his native state.

Mr. Hudson served his professional novitiate in Nashville and the
same was of brief duration, as he soon proved his powers as a trial
lawyer and able counselor and made substantial headway in his
practice, besides gaining reputation as an effective public speaker.
Two of his public addresses and his acknowledged professional talent
brought him to the attention of Robert VAUGHN the district attorney,
in whose office he was appointed an assistant - a position which he
retained seven years and in which he gained most valuable experience
in all phases of legal work. Incidentally he received from the
Supreme Court of Tennessee the compliment of being declared the
ablest indictment draftsman in the state, this tribute finding ample
justification when it is stated that during his seven years of
service as an assistant to the district attorney not a single error
was found in an indictment drawn by him. He resigned his position in
the public service in 1902, the year when he came to Oklahoma
Territory.

In May, 1902, Mr. Hudson established his residence at Lawton, the
present judicial center of Comanche County, this state, where he was
engaged in the practice of law until 1907 and where he was most
influential in effecting the organization of the forces of the
democratic party in the section that had been formerly the Kiowa and
Comanche Indian Reservation which had been opened to settlement in
1901.

In 1907, the year that marked the admission of the State of Oklahoma
to the Union, Mr. Hudson removed to Frederick, the county seat of
Tillman County, and there he found the stage of his successful
professional activities until his removal to the City of Tulsa, in
1912. He has gained in this important oil and gas district of the
state a foremost position at the bar and also as a zealous worker in
the furtherance of industrial and civic progress. In 1914, without
having made a personal canvass of campaign, Mr. Hudson was elected
representative of Tulsa County in the lower house of the State
Legislature, opposing factions of the democratic party in the
election. In the Fifth Legislature he became one of the leading
candidates for the position of speaker of the House, but before the
end of the contest he withdrew in favor of Hon. Alexander MCCROY, who
was elected. He was appointed chairman of the committee on oil and
gas, and was the author of several bills that were designed to remedy
many untoward and unjust conditions existing in the oil and gas belt.
As an earnest supporter of the administration of Governor WILLIAMS,
he did his part in fostering legislation insuring retrenchment and
reform.

Mr. Hudson was selected by the Legislature as one of three, to draw
articles of impeachment against A. P. WATSON, one of the corporation
commissioners of the State of Oklahoma. After the impeachment
articles were presented to the House of Representatives, then Mr.
Hudson was selected as one of the prosecutors of Mr. Watson.

This Watson case made history in the new State of Oklahoma, and he
was ably defended by a firm of able lawyers and they resorted to
every possible and honorable means to acquit him, but under the
splendid management of Mr. Hudson, together with his colleagues, C.
L. PINKHAM and Judge DICKINSON, Mr. Watson was impeached under
several of the impeachment charges. It was practically left to Mr.
Hudson to sum up the evidence in the case and it is the consensus of
opinion of all who heard his speech that it was one of the most
powerful and brilliant speeches ever made in the State of Oklahoma.

Mr. Hudson is identified actively with the Tulsa County Bar
Association and the Oklahoma State Bar Association. He is a valued
member of the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce and is president of the
Workman Oil & Gas Company, which has important mineral holdings in
the eastern part of the state and which is instituting the
development of these properties. Mr. Hudson is a charter member of
the lodge of Benevolent & Protective Order of Elks in the City of
Nashville, Tennessee, and in Tulsa he is affiliated with the Knights
of Pythias.

At Hopkinsville, Kentucky, on the 8th of May, 1894, was recorded the
marriage of Mr. Hudson to Miss Annie DADE, whose father was a scion
of an old and distinguished family of Virginia, that gracious cradle
of much of our national history. Mr. and Mrs. Hudson have two
children, Bessie and Robert, aged respectively eighteen and fifteen
years, in 1915.

Typed for OKGenWeb by: Vickie Neill Taylor, January 11, 1999.