David E. Bryant

BRYANT, DAVID E. (1849–1910). David E. Bryant, attorney and judge, the son of Anthony Bryant, was born in LaRue County, Kentucky, on October 19, 1849. His family moved to the area of Whitewright, Texas, in 1851, and Bryant received his primary and secondary education in local schools. He attended Trinity College (now Duke University) at Durham, North Carolina, and graduated with honors in 1871. He subsequently studied law at a firm in McKinney, Texas, which included among its partners former governor J. W. Throckmorton and future Texas chief justice T. J. Brown. Bryant was admitted to the state bar in 1873 and entered a partnership with Brown, when the latter moved to Sherman. Bryant later established the firm of Bryant and Dillard, with Frank Clifford Dillard. From 1873 until 1890 he served on the board of directors of the Merchants and Planters Bank of Sherman. He married a Miss Thompson in 1879, and he and his wife raised four children. In 1890 President Benjamin Harrison appointed Bryant district judge of the United States court for the eastern district of Texas. He remained on the federal bench until his death in a St. Louis, Missouri, hospital on February 5, 1910.

From his obit in the Dallas Morning News:

“He was a plain, unostentatious man, candid even to bluntness, but ever considerate of both the feelings and rights of his fellow men...Judge D. E. Bryant, like his father, was a man who dared to express his opinion at any time, but was fair and considerate to those from whom he differed in personal life. He was a man of gentle nature and tender heart – a philanthropist.” The U.S. Attorney for Dallas stated: “Judge David E. Bryant was a man of the people. An appointed judge, sitting for life, he exercised an autocratic power with gentleness and leniency seldom found in the elective judiciary. Broad, fair, fearless, he presided with that blindness to prejudice and favoritism that should ever mark justice in action.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Dallas Morning News, February 6, 1910.

Who Was Who in America, Vol. 1.

Brian Hart, "BRYANT, DAVID E.," Handbook of Texas Online (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fbraw), accessed December 16, 2011. Published by the Texas State Historical Association.