Harmon Caldwell Drew

Background

Harmon C. Drew was born in Minden to Richard Cleveland Drew, also a judge of the district and circuit courts, and the former Katie Caldwell (1859–1936). His paternal grandfather was Richard Maxwell Drew, a district judge and state representative. In 1818, R. M. Drew's father, Newett Drew, founded the Overton community, the first settlement in Webster Parish.

After graduation from Minden High School, formerly the Minden Male Academy, Drew attended from 1904 to 1910 Louisiana State University and its Paul M. Hebert Law Center in the capital city of Baton Rouge. He was affiliated with Kappa Sigma fraternity and the national honor society, Phi Kappa Phi. He played football for the LSU Tigers and was the starting left guard on the 1909 team. He participated in the first international game in Cuba against Havana University.

In 1913, Drew married the former Annie Lucile Grigsby (March 25, 1896 – August 10, 1974). The couple had two children, R. Harmon Drew, Sr., an attorney, Minden city judge, and a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives, and Katie Elizabeth Drew Carey (1915–1971), a Minden Realtor, married to and later divorced from Harvey Locke Carey, the short-term U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Louisiana in Shreveport, appointed in 1950 by U.S. President Harry S. Truman to succeed Malcolm Lafargue, who stepped down to run for the United States Senate against the then two-year incumbent Russell B. Long, older of the two sons of Huey Long. In 1960, Carey was an unsuccessful candidate for a district judgeship in the Democratic primary, having lost to O. E. Price. Carey had also run unsuccessfully in 1948 against the Democratic U.S. Representative Overton Brooks for Louisiana's 4th congressional district.

At first, Drew, a physically large man who commonly wore suspenders, practiced law in Minden with his father, whose circuit judgeship had ended in 1913.

Axe-murder case

On December 8, 1916, Drew assumed the post of Webster Parish district attorney. Less than a month in office, Drew was compelled to prosecute a bizarre murder case in the Grove community north of Minden. On Christmas Day of that year, the family of John Nelson Reeves, including his wife Maude and three of their four children, was bludgeoned to death by a group of axe-wielding men. The presumed motive for the killing was money that Reeves, who distrusted banks, had boasted of having stashed away in a mattress in his house. The district judge in the case was John N. Sandlin, later a U.S. representative and like Drew an intraparty opponent of the Longs.

Two African American men, Chester Tyson and Mark Peters, were convicted and scheduled for execution for the five murders. However, Governor John M. Parker, acting on a recommendation from Judge Sandlin, commuted their sentences to twenty years in prison. Both were released on April 18, 1936. A petition sent to the Louisiana Board of Pardons claimed that two white men, Henry Waller and Johnie Long, had actually planned and carried out the crime but had each received life sentences, rather than the death penalty. Long escaped in 1922 and was never apprehended, and Waller died of tuberculosis in prison in 1926.

Judicial tenure

In 1926, Drew was elected judge of the 2nd Judicial District, renamed the 26th District, covering Bossier and Webster parishes. Drew served three years on the lower court. He was elected in 1928 to the circuit court, on which he served for two six-year terms from 1930 to 1942. More than a year passed from his election to this court to his taking of the office.

Political squabbles

In 1933, Judge Drew, who served as the president of the interest group known as the Louisiana New Deal Organization, an association committed to promoting the policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, got into a heated exchange with U.S. Senator Huey Pierce Long, Jr., who had been less than fully committed to the Roosevelt agenda. In a speech in Monroe, Long alleged that Drew had paid only $600 on an outstanding debt owed to the former Bank of Minden. The next night in Minden, accompanied by his bodyguards, Long spoke at Minden City Park. Judge Drew was there to challenge him directly. Instead, Long uttered mild remarks and did not attack the judge. After Long left the gathering, Drew told the crowd:

"I came here tonight to hear him [Long] repeat that lie in my presence, and he didn't have the nerve to do it. Louisiana must act to stop that man when he goes about the state attacking honest people. I for one do not intend to tolerate it any longer."

Coincidentally, the day after the Minden Herald published the story of the Long-Drew squabble, John L. Fort (1906–1992) of Minden, the son of then Mayor Connell Fort and later the owner of a Minden news stand, shot to death city council member Abraham Brisco Nation (1886–1933) as a result of a political dispute between Nation and Mayor Fort. In 1937, Judge Drew was a pallbearer at the funeral of former Mayor Fort.

In the 1940 judicial election, Robert Kennon, the district attorney and former mayor of Minden, handily unseated Drew, 19,934 votes (63.5 percent) to 11,439. (36.5 percent). Kennon won nine of the ten parishes in the district, having lost to Drew only in their native Webster Parish. In the preceding primary election, Kennon with 47 percent of the vote but no majority led Drew and a third candidate, Judge E. L. Walker of Ruston, who was then eliminated for further consideration.

Because Kennon soon entered World War II service, he did not claim the judgeship until 1945. Therefore, Drew continued to serve as interim judge for nearly four years until Kennon claimed his seat. Drew also served temporarily by appointment on the Louisiana Supreme Court during the latter part of his circuit judgeship.

Memorial service

H. C. Drew and most of his family members were Presbyterians.

Drew died of lung cancer at the age of sixty-one. He is interred in the newer section of the historic Minden Cemetery, alongside his wife, son Harmon Drew, Sr., daughter Katie Drew Carey, and a granddaughter, Elizabeth Taylor Drew Weaver (1942–1996). In addition to Circuit Judge Harmon Drew, Jr., Judge H. C. Drew's grandchildren are Richard Drew Carey (1934-2013), a Realtor who developed nine subdivisions in the Minden area, Thomas Drew Carey, a dermatologist in Ruston, Katie Lucile Carey Sims, a businesswoman in Houma in Terrebonne Parish in South Louisiana, and Margaret Caldwell Drew Colvin of Springhill, Louisiana.

Three weeks after his death, Judge Drew was lauded at a memorial service at the Webster Parish Courthouse for his dedication to the law:

"Judge Drew was moved by a jealousy of the law. To him, law was the pillar of fire by night and smoke by day, ever leading him onward to the fulness of law, maturing in justice."