The Trinity University School of Law, 1873-1878,
and the Jurisprudence of Texas

By MARK W. LAMBERT

The legal history of Texas recorded so far has neglected a very worthy attempt at legal education at Trinity University in the last quarter of the 19th century. Had the school survived, it would have changed the legal history, and perhaps even the jurisprudence, of the state of Texas.1

Founding, Location and Choice of Professor
Trinity University was opened on September 23, 1869, by the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in Tehuacana, Texas, situated about 30 miles east of Waco.2 The site is one of the highest elevations between Dallas and Houston.3 The school rose from the ashes of three antebellum Presbyterian schools in Texas: Ewing College, Chapel Hill College and Larissa College, all of which had failed during the Civil War. Tehuacana won the site of the new school over Dallas, Waxahachie and Round Rock, despite that all three offered the church at least $25,000 to be chosen as the location of the school.4 However, a large number of Presbyterians lived in the Tehuacana area and a Presbyterian school, the Tehuacana Academy, was there before the war.5 The area’s isolation and lack of urban temptations also made it a more attractive site for a religion-affiliated school. Trinity issued its first bachelor’s degrees in 1871.6
The Board of Trustees of Trinity formed a Law Department on July 26, 1873:
“It is resolved by this board of Trustees that the law department of Trinity University shall be opened in Connexion (sic) with the other departments of said institution for reception of students of Law.7”
The Trustees further agreed to open the department by October 1, 1873. The Board offered the Professorship of Law to Judge Davis M. Prendergast of Springfield, Texas.8 Prendergast was the obvious choice because he was a respected Texas attorney, a Cumberland Presbyterian, a Trinity founder and a Trustee.9

The First Law Professor
Judge Prendergast was born in Shelbyville, Tennessee in 1816, and graduated from East Tennessee University in Knoxville in 1841. In January 1842, he moved to Texas and appren-ticed under James Raymond in Franklin while also teaching school and hunting Indians. After passing the required oral exam before the local district judge, Prendergast was admitted to the bar in Boonesville in 1845 and was soon elected Chief Justice of Brazos County.10
In 1846, Prendergast brought his father from Tennessee to Texas, and then settled in Springfield, Texas, the county seat of newly-created Limestone County. In 1848, he married Mary E. Collins, also a Tennessean who emigrated to Brazos County with her widowed mother and eight siblings in 1841.11 Prendergast practiced law in Limestone County and became a wealthy man with substantial property.12 He served one term as Chief Justice of Limestone County, 1848-50. After raising a company of Texas infantrymen for the Civil War, Prendergast returned to Limestone County where he practiced law and served as a state representative in 1863-64 and again in 1873, the same year he accepted the teaching post at Trinity.13

Lack of a Law School in Texas
When Trinity formed its law department, no law school in Texas was issuing law degrees. In fact, there were only 31 law schools in the United States in 1870.14 San Augustine University in San Augustine formed a law department on February 12, 1844, but by 1849, the school closed having never issued a degree.15 Austin College began operating in Huntsville in 1850. Five years later, it formed a law department and graduated four students before closing the department in 1856.16 Baylor University opened in 1846 in Independence, began law lectures in 1849, and formed a law department in 1857. Baylor graduated 29 law students before closing during the Civil War.17 Reopening after the Civil War, Baylor graduated two more students in 1866. These would be the last two graduates — the law department limped along for a while, closing in 1867, reopening in 1870, closing again from 1872 to 1878, and finally disappearing in 1883. The law school eventually reopened in Waco in 1920.18 The University of Texas Law Department did not open until 1883.19

Trinity Fills the Gap
The Trinity Law Department opened in the fall of 1873 as the only law school in Texas.20 The school catalog described the campus in the following way: “The location is beyond doubt, inferior to none in the state. All its surroundings are of a refining and elevating character. It is absolutely without temptations or vice.”21
Judge Prendergast was quite modest, and perhaps realistic, considering the easy path to the bar by oral exam at the time, when describing the newly-formed law department:
“This course is by no means complete; but it is believed to be as extensive as most young gentlemen can be induced to take before commencing practice. It will prepare them to enter with credit upon the duties of their profession, even if it does not make them finished lawyers. The law is a vast science, and to reach its higher ranks will require much and continued study.22”
The course of study in the law department included assigned readings in a list of textbooks, daily class recitation, and regular moot court sessions. The full course was expected to take three sessions of five months each, but proficient students could graduate in two, and no tuition would be charged for the third semester, as an inducement for the students to complete all three sessions.23 The textbooks used in the department were Blackstone’s Commentaries, Kent’s Commentaries, Stephen’s on Pleading, Sayles on Texas Pleading, Parsons on Contracts, Greenleaf on Evidence, Story’s Equity Jurisprudence, and Washburn on Real Estate. Students were expected to own all their own textbooks, as well as Paschal’s Digest and Sayles’ Texas Practice.24
Four students attended the law department the first year.25 All four graduated at the end of the year: “An application was received from Judge D. M. Prendergast of the Law Department asking that the degree of B.L. (Bachelor of Law) be conferred upon the following students of his Department, viz. S. J. Caruthers, J. R. Sparkes, R. M. Fancher and A. C. Prendergast.”26

A Brief Stumble
In July 1874, Prendergast was appointed by Texas Governor Richard Coke as District Judge of the 33rd Judicial District Court. The following month, he notified the Trinity Board that a successor would be needed for the department, but that he “could attend to the duties of the law school for the first month and by the expiration of that time he thought a man could be found to take charge of the class.”27 Unfortunately, a replacement was not secured, and the department briefly closed its doors.

A New Law Professor
The following year, the Trinity Trustees announced that, after suspending classes at the law school for about 16 months, they hired Judge R.C. Ewing to run the department.28 With its new hire, the Trustees were jubilant: “The prospects of this department are flattering.”29 New students matriculated in the fall of 1875.
Trinity’s Board of Trustees could not have made a more auspicious selection of a new law professor. Robert Chatham Donnell Ewing was a son of Finis Ewing, the chief founder of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, to which Trinity belonged.30 R.C. Ewing was the twelfth of 13 children of Finis Ewing, and was born on March 26, 1816 in Christian County, Kentucky.31 R.C.’s oldest brother, William Lee Davidson Ewing, served as Governor of Illinois and later as a U.S. Senator from Illinois.32 R.C.’s youngest brother, Ephraim B. Ewing, read law under R.C. and later served as Attorney General for Missouri, as well as a Justice on the Missouri Supreme Court.33
In 1820, the Ewing family moved to Boonville, Missouri, and later to New Lebanon, Missouri. R.C. was educated in the common schools of the area, and eventually read the law and was admitted to the Missouri Bar in December, 1840. He practiced law in Richmond, Missouri, and ultimately earned a reputation as an “able lawyer.”34 For the next 30 plus years, R. C. practiced and taught law, attempted assorted business ventures, served as a member of a state constitutional convention, ran unsuccessfully for Governor of Missouri, and served as a Missouri district court judge. He also traveled widely throughout the Western United States, as well as Central and South America and the Caribbean — not an easy feat in the 19th century. Ultimately, Judge Ewing moved to Texas to run the Trinity Law Department in 1875.

A Changed Curriculum at Trinity
Judge Ewing was considered a “fine Christian gentleman and a capable teacher of the law.”35 From the outset, he also made an important addition to the curriculum of the law department. Appearing in the list of required textbooks was a book entitled Spanish Law of Real Estate.36
The addition of this one title to the curriculum was very significant. Knowledge of Spanish and Mexican law was still important in 1875 for any legal practitioner in the state of Texas. Even though Texas successfully revolted against Mexico in 1836 and formed the Republic of Texas before joining the United States in 1845, 26 million acres of Texas land were held through grants originating in the Spanish and Mexican period, and were still governed by their laws.37 As a result, any land disputes involving Texas land acquired under Spain and Mexico had to be addressed under the Spanish or Mexican laws in effect at the time of the land grant.
Judge Ewing was apparently well-versed in Spanish and Mexican law:
“The fact that the territory of Louisiana, out of which the state of Missouri was carved, was once under the dominion of Spain, and subsequently under that of France, rendered it indispensable to professional success that the early lawyers should become familiar with the Spanish and Civil law . . .; hence most of the lawyers . . . were not only well versed in both, but by persistent effort to become so, formed habits of study and application which gave them well-deserved eminence in their profession.38”
Thus, Judge Ewing’s knowledge of Spanish law would have been highly useful in Texas.
In his second year at the Trinity law department, Judge Ewing changed the Spanish law text to Gustavus Schmidt’s The Civil Law of Spain and Mexico.39 Published in New Orleans in 1851, this text contained a more general treatment of Hispanic law popular in the American frontier and that was cited by the Texas Supreme Court as early as 1855.40
The importance of using these two books on Hispanic law in the Trinity curriculum cannot be overstated. In post-Civil War Texas, Hispanic law was not being taught anywhere else but Trinity. Of the three other major attempts at academic legal education in Texas in the 19th century, neither Baylor, Austin College, nor The University of Texas were teaching or using textbooks containing Hispanic law.41

“This Department is now in successful operation”
In 1875-76, nine students attended the law department, six of whom graduated at the end of the year. Trinity’s 1875-76 catalog confirmed the school’s commitment to teaching Hispanic law:
“It is our aim to qualify students to practice in the Texas courts, and with a view to this we teach not only a comprehensive course of the Common Law, but also the Civil Law of Spain and Mexico, and Sayle’s Texas Pleadings.”
Students were no longer required to own Paschal’s Digest, perhaps because it was now furnished in the school’s law library.42 The 1875-76 catalogue also bragged that the Department “is now in successful operation”:
“In the two years of its existence ten students have graduated [and] the exercises of our moot court, which meets every week, teach the student the difficult art of so preparing his pleadings and papers as to successfully resist any assault from old and experienced attorneys.43”
The following school year brought the law department eight students, six of whom graduated at the end of 1877.
The Trinity Catalog for 1877-78 is the last to mention the Law Department. At the time, the department had nine students, including one post-graduate, and six of whom graduated at the end of 1878.

End of the Law Department
In January 1879, one of Trinity’s trustees moved to sell the old college building that housed the law department, but after discussion, the motion was tabled until the next meeting.44 At the next meeting on February 22, 1879, the Board passed a resolution authorizing the executive committee to sell the old college property.
This vote sounded the death knell for Trinity’s Law Department. Neither the 1878-79 Trinity University Catalog, nor any later catalog contain information on courses offered by the law department or whether it was even in operation. Thus, the actions of the Trinity Board of Trustees in January and February of 1879 hint that even though the law department did not begin classes in the fall of 1878, there was some hope that it could resume classes in January of 1879. When it did not, the trustees then agreed to sell off the old college building.
Determining what caused the Trinity University Law Department to close is difficult based on the available materials. Nevertheless, the closing could have been caused by either the full-time professor, Judge Ewing, or the University itself. Since the tuition paid by students went directly as salary to the law professor, Ewing could have made the decision that the salary coming in was not as high as expected, needed or promised by the school, and left the law department to practice law or pursue another line of work. Or perhaps Ewing’s lifelong wanderlust could have again struck, sending him off on another adventure. Since Prendergast was serving as a district judge at the time, he was not available as a replacement. Moreover, considering the remuneration, Prendergast may have been unwilling to teach in the law department, thus causing it to shut down.
As another cause, the school itself could also have closed the department down. Both the nation and the state of Texas were in the midst of an economic depression in the middle and late 1870’s following the “Panic of 1873,” one of the worst in the country’s history.45 In 1877, most of the faculty of the rest of the university had resigned, probably due to Trinity’s lack of ability to pay their salaries.46
In addition, Trinity was plagued by a poor location. Tehuacana was without rail service until 1903, which greatly limited the town’s growth. In fact, this isolation eventually forced Trinity to relocate to Waxahachie in 1902.47 Thus, while it seems possible that Trinity might have been forced to close the law department down based purely on economics, it may be more likely that the closing was done by necessity, or by choice, by Judge Ewing.

Students and Graduates of Trinity
The Trinity Law Department graduated a total of 22 students over its four years of existence between 1873 and 1878. Some of these students later reached a very high level of success in the legal profession:
• R. M. Fancher, from Louisiana, remained in Texas after graduating from Trinity in 1874 and served as County Attorney of Limestone County, 1876-78, and County Judge of Limestone County, 1880-84.48
• Albert Collins Prendergast, who was Law Professor D. M. Prendergast’s son, practiced law in Limestone County and later in Waco. He also served as a Texas state legislator for one term, as well as a Justice on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, 1911-18, serving as Chief Justice, 1913-18. He died in 1922.49
• Truman H. Conner of Ellis County began his law practice in Waxahachie, then in 1877, moved to Eastland. He served as Judge of the 42nd Judicial District from 1887 to 1898, and then as Chief Justice of the Fort Worth Court of Appeals from 1898 to 1933. He died in 1933.50
• Arthur Branch Storey of San Marcos practiced law in Lockhart and San Antonio, and served as County Attorney of Blanco County from 1877 to 1882.51
• William Franklin Ramsey of Johnson County created a prosperous law practice in Cleburne. He later became the president of three banks: The National Bank of Cleburne, the First National Bank of Covington, and the Farmer and Traders Bank of Rio Vista. Ramsey was appointed to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in 1907, and then won election to the seat, but in 1911 resigned to accept appointment as a Texas Supreme Court Justice. He served for one year before resigning to run for Governor of Texas, losing the race to incumbent Oscar B. Colquitt. Ramsey is the only man to have served on both of the high courts of Texas. He died in 1922. He was also the father-in-law of later U.S. Supreme Court Justice from Texas Tom Clark and grandfather of United States Attorney General Ramsey Clark.52
• J. A. L. Wolfe of Cooper County, Missouri remained in Texas to practice law in McKinney and Sherman, and served as the Collin County Judge from 1884 to 1886.53
• Samuel D. Stinson of Hunt County was an attorney in Hunt County and served as Hunt County Attorney from 1880 to 1884.54
As a side note, Thomas Mitchell Campbell, who served as Governor from 1907 to 1911, claimed that he attended the Trinity University Law Department in 1873, but withdrew after a year. There is no record of Campbell having attended the law department, but he could have attended for one semester and then dropped out, thus not showing up in the catalog for that year.55

The Two Law Professors
Judge Prendergast remained a loyal friend to Trinity even after the law department closed, serving as a trustee until 1902.56 After serving one term as Judge of the 13th District, Prendergast retired from the law in 1880 and became a banker. In 1882, when the only bank in Mexia relocated to Dallas, Prendergast and his partners established “Prendergast, Smith, and Company” in Mexia, a bank which served that town for more than 60 years.57 Prendergast was the Prohibition Party candidate for Governor of Texas in 1892, but the party made a dismal showing at the polls. Prendergast was also an unsuccessful candidate for the Texas Supreme Court in 1904. He died in Mexia on March 2, 1910.58
After the law department closed, Judge Ewing relocated to Alvarado, the oldest town in Johnson County and less than 30 miles south of Fort Worth. In 1880, Alvarado’s businesses consisted primarily of raising corn, cotton and cattle. Judge Ewing is believed to have died in Alvarado on August 27th, 1882.59

The Impact of Trinity
The high degree of later success of the Trinity graduates confirms the high quality of legal instruction obtained there. Had the school survived, there is little doubt its alumni would have made a great mark upon the legal history of the state of Texas. However, it is unfortunate that one of the university’s earliest perceived benefits, of being in the country away from city vices, probably also doomed the school, and the law department, to problems later, effectively killing the law department and later forcing the university to move to Waxahachie in 1902.60
It would take the success of the University of Texas Law School, started in 1883, to prove that academic legal education was the wave of the future in Texas. The UT Law School’s success can be identified from its two chief attributes in those early years: its presence in the state capital and its first two law professors who were perhaps the two most respected attorneys in Texas at the time. Oran Roberts, ex-Governor and ex-Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court, and Robert S. Gould, also ex-Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court, founded the UT Law School.61
However, in one aspect of Texas jurisprudence,62 the survival of the Trinity Law Department might have benefited the state as much as the UT Law School. When it opened, the UT Law School did not teach the surviving Hispanic law that was embedded in Texas law. As the most successful and respected law school in the state, UT later served as the template for other Texas law schools. Thus, as Hispanic law was eliminated from law school criteria, more and more new law school graduates had little knowledge of Texas’s Hispanic law past, and remnants of that past were forgotten.63
With a part of Texas’s Hispanic past forgotten, Texas lawyers and judges incorrectly imbued the state’s water law with English common law from the 1880’s until the 1940’s. Since the 1940’s, however, learned lawyers and judges unearthed the forgotten Spanish law elements in Texas law.64 J. Chrys Dougherty, in the Texas Tidelands Oil litigation of the 1950s,65 and Judge Jack Pope, in his Valmont Plantations ruling of 1961,66 both used ancient Spanish law to buttress their work. Other Texas lawyers soon began referring back to these forgotten laws to argue their cases.
The Spanish elements to Texas law are now no longer forgotten.67 However, if Trinity’s modest attempt at a law school had survived, along with Judge R. C. Ewing’s knowledge and teachings on the Spanish law aspects to Texas law, perhaps “that dark period of ignorance before the bar rediscovered the Spanish law” would not have occurred in Texas.68

Endnotes
1. Nancy Jo Newton & W. Frank Newton, Legal Education in Texas, in Centennial History of the Texas Bar, 1882-1982, at 159-80 (1981). Mention of the existence of Trinity University’s Law Department was found in Alfred Zantzinger Reed, Appendix: Lists of Law Schools, in Training For the Public Profession of the Law: Historical Development and Principal Contemporary Problems of Legal Education in the United States, with Some Account of Conditions in England and Canada, at 425 (1921). 2. Donald E. Everett, “Trinity University,” Vivian Elizabeth Smyrl, “Tehuacana, Texas,” and Ellen Maschino, “Limestone County,” in The Handbook of Texas Online (visited July 31, 2003) <http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/ articles/view/>.
3. Texas State Historical Marker, “Tehuacana.” Austin, Tex.: Texas Historical Commission, 1967. 4. Ray A. Walter, A History of Limestone County 117 (1959). 5. June Rayfield Welch, Trinity University, in The Colleges of Texas, at 20 (1981); Texas State Historical Marker, “Tehuacana.” 6. Id. 7. Trinity University Board of Trustees Minutes, July 26, 1873, at 162-63, Trinity University Archives. 8. Id. 9. Walker, supra note 4, at 30, 118; John Henry Brown, D. M. Prendergast, in Indian Wars and Pioneers of Texas 257 (Southern Historical Press, 1994) (1880). Prendergast is listed as one of the founding members of the Trinity University Board of Trustees in An Act to Incorporate Trinity University, located at Tehuacana Hills, Limestone County, Texas, 6 Gammel 678 (1898). 10. Randolph B. Campbell, “Prendergast, Davis M’Gee,” in The Handbook of Texas Online (visited July 22, 2003) <http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/ online/articles/view/PP/fpr5.html>; Brown, supra note 9, at 256-57. 11. Id. 12. U.S. Census data from 1860 showed Prendergast owning nine slaves, $26,425 in real property, and $21,100 in personal property. Ralph W. Wooster, An Analysis of the Membership of the Texas Secession Convention, 62 Sw. Hist. Q. 322, 333 (1959). 13. Campbell, supra note 10; Brown, supra note 9, at 256-57. 14. Robert B. Stevens, Law Schools and Legal Education, 1879-1979: Lectures in Honor of 100 Years of the Valparaiso Law School, 14 Val. U. L. Rev. 179, 193 (1980). 15. William Stuart Red, A History of the Presbyterian Church in Texas 222 (1936), cited in Lois Smith Murray, Baylor at Independence 149 (1972). 16. Jack W. Humphries, Notes and Documents: The Law Department at Old Austin College, 83 Sw. Hist. Q. 371, 378, 383 (1980). 17. Charles Alfred Mackenzie, A History of the Baylor University School of Law From the Lectures of Abner Lipscomb through the Deanship of Abner V. McCall 2, 3, 11, 111 (1988) (unpublished M.A. thesis, Baylor University) (on file with the Baylor University Library). 18. Id. at 12-21, 112. 19. Hans W. Baade, Law at Texas: The Roberts-Gould Era (1883-1893), 86 Sw. Hist. Q. 161, 166 (1982). 20. Mackenzie, supra note 17, at 15. 21. Fifth Annual Trinity University Catalogue, 1873-74, at 28 (on file with the Trinity University Archives). 22. Id. at 25. 23. Id. at 26-27. 24. Id. at 25. 25. Id. at 25. 26. Trinity University Board of Trustees Minutes, June 18, 1874, at 192, Trinity University Archives. 27. Trinity University Board of Trustees Minutes, August 22, 1874, at 197, Trinity University Archives. 28. Trinity University Board of Trustees Minutes, April 24, 1875, at 213, Trinity University Archives. 29. Trinity University Board of Trustees Minutes, July 24, 1875, at 219, Trinity University Archives. 30. R.H.N., Finis Ewing, in 6 The Dictionary of American Biography 233 (Allen Johnson & Dumas Malone, eds., 1931). 31. Eugene Allen Cordry, History of New Lebanon, Cooper County, Missouri 40-41 (1976). 32. William Lee Davidson Ewing, Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1774-Present (visited Aug. 8, 2003) <http://bioguide. congress.gov>. 33. William Van Ness Bay, Ephraim B. Ewing, in Reminiscences of the Bench and Bar of Missouri 172 (1878); Charles W. Sloan, Ephraim B. Ewing, 11 Green Bag 441 (1899). 34. Id. 35. Samuel Hornbeak, History of Trinity University 71 (unpublished and undated manuscript, on file with the Trinity University Archives). 36. Because no textbook can be located that bears that exact title, the book’s actual, complete title was probably A Compilation of Spanish and Mexican Law, in Relation to Mines, and Titles to Real Estate, in force in California, Texas and New Mexico: and in the Territories acquired under the Louisiana and Florida Treaties, when Annexed to the United States by John A. Rockwell, and published in New York in 1851. 37. This is still true today. Joseph W. McKnight, The Spanish Watercourses of Texas, in Essays in Legal History in Honor of Felix Frankfurter 373 (1966), citing Texas Almanac 538 (1964-1965); Joseph W. McKnight, Tracings of Texas Legal History: Breaking Ties and Borrowing Traditions, in Centennial History of the Texas Bar, 1882-1982 259 (1981). 38. Bay, supra note 33, at v. 39. Gustavus Schmidt had been born in Sweden in 1795, and immigrated to the United States, settling in New Orleans in 1829. He died in 1877. Schmidt was a well known attorney in New Orleans, and was an expert in the civil law systems of Europe and Louisiana. In 1841 Schmidt started the Louisiana Law Journal, which carried articles concentrating on the civil law. Unfortunately, the journal died after one year. Schmidt also started the first law school in Louisiana, “Schmidt’s Law School,” in 1844, which later became the University of Louisiana Law Department, and finally later the Tulane University Law Department. Schmidt compiled The Civil Law of Spain and Mexico after he researched the subject to educate himself on the Spanish elements of Louisiana law. Schmidt involved himself directly in Texas history when he made a speech in New Orleans on October 13, 1835, supporting the Texas rebellion against Mexican Dictator Santa Anna. On this point, see Eugene C. Barker, The Tampico Expedition, 3 Quart. Tex. St. Hist. Ass’n 169, 171 (1903). On Schmidt generally, see Schmidt, Gustavus, 2 Dict. La. Bio. 722 (1988); Schmidt, Gustavus and Charles Edouard, 2 Louisiana: Comprising Sketches of Parishes, Towns, Events, Institutions, and Persons, Arranged in Cyclopedic Form 125-26 (Alcee’ Fortier, ed. 1914). 40. Joseph W. McKnight, Law Books in the Hispanic Frontier, 27 J. West 74, 81 (1988). 41. This probably holds true as well for San Augustine University’s Law Department in the period, 1844-1849, since Oran Roberts taught law there, as well as later at the University of Texas Law Department. For a listing of textbooks used in the curriculum of Austin College, see Humphries, supra note 16, at 380; for Baylor, see MacKenzie, supra note 17, at 107-110; for the University of Texas, no actual list of textbooks has been published, but for strong evidence to the fact that the school ignored teaching Hispanic law, see Baade, supra note 19 at 180-181. 42. Trinity University Catalogue, 1875-76, at 28 (on file with the Trinity University Archives). 43. Id. 44. Trinity University Board of Trustees Minutes, Jan. 31, 1879, at 294, Trinity University Archives. 45. Id. 46. Welch, supra note 5, at 22. 47. Id.; Vivian Elizabeth Smyrl, “Tehuacana,” The Handbook of Texas Online (visited July 31, 2003) <http://www.utexas.edu.handbook/online/articles/ view/TT/hlt4.html>. 48. Walter, supra note 4, at 142, 144. 49. Hornbeak, supra note 35 at 69; Beryl V. Bowen, “Prendergast, Albert Collins,” The Handbook of Texas Online (visited July 31, 2003) <http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/view/PP/fpr4.html>; Ocie Speer, Texas Jurists, 1835-1936 450-51 (1936). 50. Truman H. Conner, in Encyclopedia of Texas at 607 (Ellis Arthur Davis, ed., 1920); T.H. Conner, Jurist, Dies at Temple Hospital, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Oct. 26, 1933, at 1A. 51. Hornbeak, supra note 35 at 71-74; Blanco in 1880, in Heritage of Blanco County, Texas 130 (1987). 52. Brian Hart, “Ramsey, William Franklin,” The Handbook of Texas Online (visited July 31, 2003) <http://tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/view/ RR/fra27.html>; Speer, supra note 49 at 102-03, 446-47. 53. Robert Chatham Ewing was also originally from Cooper County, Missouri. Perhaps Wolfe was sent by the Ewing family or friends to Texas to study under him. Hornbeak, supra note 35 at 71-74; J. Lee Stambaugh & Lilian J. Stambaugh, A History of Collin County, Texas 246 (1958). 54. Hornbeak, supra note 35 at 71-74; 1880 United States Census, Precinct 1, Hunt County, Texas at 422A; 1 Archives and Pioneers of Hunt County, Texas 172-73, 177, 179 (Frances Terry Ingmire, ed., 1975). 55. The Trinity catalogs seem to have been printed during or at the end of each school year. Janet Schmelzer, “Campbell, Thomas Mitchell,” The Handbook of Texas Online (visited July 31, 2003) <http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/view/CC/ fca37.html>. 56. Trinity again relocated in 1942 to San Antonio, where it is now. Everett, supra note 2; Welch, supra note 5, at 24. 57. Walter, supra note 4, at 90. 58. Id. at 90, 119; Campbell, supra note 10; Brown, supra note 9 at 257. 59. Gordon Miltenberger, Johnson County, Texas Cemetery Inscriptions (1972). 60. Everett, supra note 2; Welch, supra note 5, at 24. 61. Baade, supra note 19, at 161-96. On Roberts, see Ford Dixon, “Roberts, Oran Milo,” The Handbook of Texas Online (visited Sept. 8, 2003) <http:// www.tsha.utexas.edu/ handbook/online/articles/view/RR/from18.html>. On Gould, see Fred F. Abbey, “Gould, Robert Simonton,” The Handbook of Texas Online (visited Sept. 8, 2003) <http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/ articles/view/GG/fgo22.html>. 62. Defined by Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 7th Edition, as “a system or body of law; the course of court decisions; the science or philosophy of law,” and in Black’s Law Dictionary, 6th Edition, as “the philosophy of law, or the science which treats of the principles of positive law and legal relations.” 63. Hans W. Baade, Reflections on the Reception (Or Renaissance) of the Civil Law in Texas, 55 SMU L. Rev. 59, 63-64 (2002); Baade, supra note 19, at 180-81. 64. Baade, supra note 63, at 65-66. 65. This case involved the Federal Government laying claim to oil and mineral rights off the Texas coast. See Price Daniel, “Tidelands Controversy,” The Handbook of Texas Online (visited Sept. 8, 2003) <http://www.tsha. utexas.edu/ handbook/online/articles/view/TT/mgt2.html>. 66. This case involved water rights in dispute in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. See State v. Valmont Plantations, 346 S.W.2d 853 (Tex. Civ. App.–San Antonio 1961), decision adopted, 355 S.W.2d 502 (Tex. 1962). 67. Joseph McKnight is a long-time Professor at Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law. Hans Baade is at the University of Texas School of Law. 68. McKnight, The Spanish Watercourses of Texas, supra note 37 at 379.

Mark W. Lambert is the Special Collections Librarian at the Fred Parks Law Library, South Texas College of Law in Houston. He gratefully acknowledges the excellent assistance of Janice Sabec and her staff at the Trinity University Archives in the preparation of this article.

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