Background
Wade was born at the Prospect Hill Plantation in Jefferson County near Fayette, Mississippi, to Isaac Ross Wade (1814-1891) and the former Catherine Elizabeth Dunbar (1820-1865).
Wade was born at the Prospect Hill Plantation in Jefferson County near Fayette, Mississippi, to Isaac Ross Wade (1814-1891) and the former Catherine Elizabeth Dunbar (1820-1865).
Of Scottish descent, Wade was affiliated with the Clan Gregor Society. From 1888 to 1904, he served as a Democrat in the Louisiana House of Representatives. During part of his legislative tenure, Wade served alongside Robert H. Snyder of Saint Joseph, who was a House Speaker.
Two years after Wade left the House, Samuel West. Martien, a large cotton planter from Waterproof in southern Tensas Parish, began a 14-year tenure in the House.
Wade was a delegate to the 1898 Louisiana Constitutional Convention. He served on the Louisiana State Board of Education from 1896 to 1900 during the second administration of Governor Murphy J. Foster, Senior
Such dual office-holding is no longer permitted in Louisiana. Wade also served on the Tensas Parish School Board and, he was thereafter appointed and served for at least twenty years as the Tensas school superintendent, long one of the most important positions in the small parish nestled along oxbow lakes next to the Mississippi River.
Anna"s husband was named for her father, Doctor Thomas Baldwin Magruder (1800-1885), of Portuguese Gibson in Claiborne County in southwestern Mississippi.
Anna Magruder Wade was seriously injured in a horse-and-buggy accident in 1912. After weeks of therapy, she recovered from her wounds though she had been at the point of death on several occasions. Anna Wade also spent time in a sanitarium in New Orleans.
Nevertheless, she died in Newellton in 1918 at the age of fifty-six of a different problem, toxiema.
Thomas Wade was a widower for the remaining decade of his life. Thomas and Anna Wade and other family members are interred at Winter Green Cemetery in Portuguese Gibson, Mississippi.
The Wades had one child, Thomas Wade, II (1889-1971), a lawyer in the Tensas parish seat of Saint Joseph, who later lived in Missoula, Montana, and El Dorado, Arkansas, where he died at the age of eighty-two. From a second marriage to his then surviving widow, the former Mary Gwendolyn Webb, he had a daughter, Mission Anna Wade of El Dorado.
Grandson Thomas Wade, III, was first an attorney and from 1940 to 1942 the mayor of Saint Joseph before he enlisted in the United States Navy during World World War World War II Thereafter, he graduated from the theological seminary of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, and became an ordained Episcopal priest with service between 1957 and 1979 in DeRidder, Minden, Baton Rouge, and Pineville, Louisiana.
After he retired from the ministry, he spent his last years in Saint Joseph.