William Thomas Bland

William Thomas Bland (January 21, 1861 – January 15, 1928) was an American lawyer and businessman born in what became West Virginia during the American Civil War and who served as a U.S. Representative from Missouri.

Early life William Thomas Bland was born on January 21, 1861, in Weston, the county seat of Lewis County, Virginia (in what would soon become West Virginia) to Columbia Ann Madison Jackson Duncan and her second husband, Dr. William John Bland (1816-1897). William T. Bland was descended from the First Families of Virginia. His father would represent Lewis County in the Virginia House of Delegates in 1863-1865, as well as become the chief surgeon of his brother-in-law CSA General Stonewall Jackson's Brigade and later become the President of the West Virginia Medical Association and superintendent of the West Virginia State Hospital for the Insane (1881-1889) His father's elder brother Newton B. Bland would also become a local physician. His farmer grandfather Thomas Bland (1793-1867) owned slaves in 1840 and served several terms in the Virginia House of Delegates beginning in 1823 and was one of Lewis County's delegates to the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1850. His maternal grandfather John G. Jackson and cousin James M. Jackson also were prominent politicians in Harrison County for decades.

Career Admitted to the West Virginia bar, Bland began practicing law in his native Weston, Lewis County, West Virginia. Bland moved west to Atchison, Kansas, in 1887, where he became the prosecuting attorney of Atchison County, Kansas (from 1890 to 1892) and won election as mayor of Atchison in 1894. Bland was Episcopalian.