Richard Cleveland Drew, Senior, also known as R. C. Drew, was a judge of the state district and circuit courts, based in Minden in northwestern Louisiana.
Background
Drew was born in rural Webster Parish to the former Sarah Jessie Cleveland (1828-1880) and Richard Maxwell Drew (1822-1850), an attorney, district judge, delegate to the Louisiana state constitutional convention of 1845, and state representative from 1848 until his death, at the age of barely twenty-eight.
Education
R. C. Drew was educated at the former Homer College in Homer, the seat of Claiborne Parish.
Career
The Drew family was among the original 19th-century settlers of the future Webster Parish, of which Minden is the parish seat. The first Drew arrived in 1818 in the Overton community on Dorcheat Bayou. Richard Maxwell Drew is interred at an abandoned cemetery in Overton.
His epitaph on his tombstone, which was damaged several years ago by a dozer operating in the area, reads: "His public and private virtues have survived his death and will endure when this dumb marble shall have faded."
He read law under A. B. George and was admitted to the bar in 1872 at Monroe, Louisiana.
In 1880, R. C. Drew married the former Katie Roberta Caldwell (October 15, 1859 – December 5, 1936), a native of Plain Dealing in northern Bossier Parish and the daughter of Colonel and Mistress Thomas J. Caldwell, who were originally from South Carolina.
Katie Caldwell was educated at a female seminary in Paris in northeastern Texas. R. C. and Katie Drew had seven children, including Harmon Caldwell Drew, a district and circuit court judge who served on both benches from 1930 to 1945.
R. C. and H. C. Drew remain the only father/son combination to have served as a judge on both state district and circuit courts in Louisiana.
Their other children, all but one of whom died before the age of sixty, were Allyn Sidney Drew (1897–1956), Richard Cleveland Drew, Junior. (1885–1950), Katie Cleveland Drew (1887–1908), Thomas Caldwell Drew (1891–1940), Waddy Thompson Drew (1894–1941), and Mary Sarah Drew (1904-1955). Thomas Caldwell Drew, a soldier in World War I, was seriously injured by German poison gas and never fully recovered.
Mary, the youngest of the Drew children, had Down"s syndrome.
Neither of the two Drew daughters married. Katie Cleveland Drew was a piano student at Cincinnati Conservatory.
While home for the Christmas holidays she became ill with influenza and died on December 23, 1908. A sister and brother-in-law of Katie Caldwell Drew died in the 1918 flu pandemic.
Their two orphans, Will and Katie Hall, were reared by R. C. and Katie Drew.
R. C. Drew"s youngest son, A. South. "Skeet" Drew, was the first judge of the Minden City Court, having assumed the position in the late 1920s. A Drew has served in a judicial capacity in Webster Parish (created from Claiborne Parish in 1871) with comparatively little interruption since 1882. R. C. Drew served as a district judge from 1882 to 1900 and again from 1904 to 1911.
Drew"s tenure on the circuit court extended from 1911 to March 1913.
In 1898, Judge Drew was a delegate to the Louisiana Constitutional Convention, as had been his father to the earlier conclave held in 1845. Drew died in Minden at the age of seventy-one.
R. C. Drew"s grandson was the Minden City Judge and State Representative R. Harmon Drew, Senior, a delegate to the most recent state constitutional convention held in Baton Rouge in 1973-1974. One of R. C. Drew"s great-grandsons is the Circuit Court of Appeal Judge Harmon Drew, Junior., also of Minden but based at the Shreveport court.
Membership
He was a member of the Masonic lodge.