Edward C. O'Rear

Edward Clay O'Rear (February 2, 1863 – September 12, 1961) was an American politician who served on the Kentucky Court of Appeals and was a Republican candidate for the United States House of Representatives in 1888 and for governor of Kentucky in 1911. His father died when O'Rear was very young, and he began work as a printer's devil to help support his mother and fourteen siblings. Eventually, he became editor of the Mountain Scorcher newspaper and read law under its publisher. He gained admission to the bar in 1882.

In 1888, O'Rear failed to unseat incumbent Congressman William P. Taulbee, but in 1894, he was elected county judge of Montgomery County, Kentucky, by a small margin, becoming the only Republican to hold that office in the county's history. He was elected to the Kentucky Court of Appeals, then the state's highest court, in 1900 and was re-elected in 1908. Among his important decisions were legalizing parimutuel betting, designating counties as the voting unit in local option prohibition votes, and upholding the Day Law that mandated racial segregation in the state's public schools. In 1911, O'Rear ran for governor, but his progressive platform alienated his party's more conservative wing, and he lost the election to Democrat James B. McCreary. Shortly after the election, he resigned from the Court of Appeals and returned to private practice.

O'Rear became wealthy as a chief counsel in Kentucky for the Consolidation Coal Co. and augmented his wealth through investments in real estate. In the 1920s, he helped Mary Carson Breckinridge legally organize the Frontier Nursing Service. He became more conservative later in life, opposing integration of the graduate school at the University of Kentucky and Democratic Gov. Bert T. Combs' attempt to revise the state constitution. He continued to practice law into his nineties, becoming one of the oldest active lawyers in the U.S. He died September 12, 1961, at 98. The combined lives of O'Rear and his father spanned the administrations of every U.S. president from George Washington to John F. Kennedy.

Early life and family Edward Clay O'Rear was born February 2, 1863, on his parents' farm in Camargo, Kentucky. He was the fourteenth of fifteen children of Daniel O'Rear and was born when his father was 68 years old. When O'Rear was seven years old, his father died, and his mother moved the family – destitute in the aftermath of the Civil War – to the county seat of Mount Sterling. To help support his family, he began work as a printer's devil at The Sentinel and Democrat, a county newspaper, at age nine. Colonel John T. Hazelrigg, the publisher of the Mountain Scorcher, was also an accomplished lawyer, and in his spare time, O'Rear read law with him. The couple had six children, five lived to adulthood – Prentice O'Rear (1884–1965), John Thomas Hazelrigg O'Rear (1885–1972), James Bigstaff O'Rear (1892–1975), Helen O'Rear Scruggs (1893–1973), Hazel O'Rear Bradley (1895–1976), and Virginia (1903 - 1906). He also expressed sympathy for Black Patch tobacco farmers in their disputes with the American Tobacco Company, in contrast to sitting Republican Governor Augustus E. Willson, who had deployed the state militia to quell violence perpetrated by The Night Riders, a violent subset of the discontent farmers. Both supported prohibition and both advocated progressive, populist reforms. McCreary won the election by a vote of 226,771 to 195,436. In the gubernatorial election of 1915, he joined with Beckham in a bi-partisan speaking tour of the state, urging the election of candidates who favored prohibition. O'Rear claimed that 90% of the state's murders could be connected to the sale or use of alcohol and cautioned that "free use of alcohol" compromised elections because an intoxicated voter was more willing to sell his vote. In 1916 as part of the coordinated efforts of the Kentucky Equal Rights Association, Jennie Hazelrigg O'Rear, led the suffrage plank committee for the Republican Party. Her committee consisted of two Kentucky First Ladies and the daughter of a governor: Katherine Waddle (Mrs. Edwin P.) Morrow, Mary Ekin (Mrs. Augustus E.) Willson, and Christine Bradley (Mrs. John Glover) South.

O'Rear established a lucrative practice as chief counsel in Kentucky for the Consolidation Coal Co. He aided the company in developing the coal and timber resources of Eastern Kentucky, creating jobs for the residents of that region and hefty profits for himself and his client.

In the early 1930s, O'Rear divorced his first wife; later he married his secretary, Mabel Taylor. An angry O'Rear demanded that Gov. Earle C. Clements call a special legislative session to appropriate funds for a black university equal to the University of Kentucky. Chandler, champion of the more conservative wing of the state's Democratic Party, joined O'Rear in his opposition. O'Rear's arguments against revision were based on legal and constitutional reasoning, while Chandler's appeals were more emotional. In November, voters rejected the convention by 17,724 votes.

A 1953 Courier-Journal profile of O'Rear noted that, at the age of 90, he still went to work in his Frankfort law office one or two days per week and still served as chief counsel for Consolidated Coal, making him one of the oldest practicing lawyers in the United States. His obituary stated that he remained physically and mentally healthy – the use of a cane notwithstanding – until spraining his ankle in a January 1961 fall. An illness left him bedfast in June of that year, and he died at his home on September 12, 1961, at the age of 98. The combined lives of O'Rear and his father spanned the administrations of every U.S. President from George Washington to John F. Kennedy.