Edward P. Buford

Edward Price Buford (December 15, 1865 – October 26, 1931) was a Virginia attorney and politician who served two widely separated terms in the Virginia House of Delegates representing his native Brunswick County, Virginia, as well as many years as the county's Commonwealth attorney (prosecutor).^[1]

Born to Martha (Pattie) Stone Hicks (1836–1901) and her lawyer (and Confederate veteran) husband Francis Emmet (Frank) Buford (1836–1909) at "Sherwood", a house his father built on land that his wife (this boy's mother) had inherited from her father. His paternal ancestry could be traced back to John Beaufort or Buford, who emigrated to Lancaster County in the Colony of Virginia in 1635.^[2] Virginia not having public schools at the time, Buford received a private education appropriate to his class near home, then continued at Col. McCabe's University School in Petersburg, before attending the University of Virginia and its law school in Charlottesville. He never married, but was a member of the Episcopal Church and the Westmoreland Club.^[3]

His mother was the granddaughter of former North Carolina governor David Stone and daughter of prominent Brunswick County lawyer Edward Hicks. His family also included three brothers and two sisters who reached adulthood. His mother had defied many whites in Lawrenceville after the Civil War based on her charity work for unfortunate blacks, including collecting funds (and donating many of her own) to construct a hospital for them outside Lawrenceville, together with the School of the Good Shepherd (which also served as an orphanage for blacks).^[4] The death her youngest child, Robert Pegram Buford (named to honor their paternal grandfather, who died shortly after the American Civil War) in 1900, devastated Pattie Buford, who died shortly thereafter.^[5] E.P. Buford also outlived his father (who died in 1909) and both of his remaining brothers, Emmet Buford (1861–1910) and Frank Buford (1868–1910). Frank had succeeded their father as editor of the Democratic leaning Brunswick Gazette, which was sold in 1922. His sister Mary, who had married Petersburg physician Robert Alston Martin, died in 1922. The longest lived Buford sibling was their sister Elizabeth (1865–1951), who married Rev. Robert Strange Jr., who became bishop of North Carolina but died in 1914.^[5]

Admitted to the Virginia bar in 1887, Buford argued his first case before the Supreme Court of Virginia in 1890, a year before Brunswick voters elected him their Commonwealth attorney (prosecutor). He was admitted to the bar of the United States Supreme Court in 1893. Buford continued as Brunswick's prosecutor until 1917, when he resigned rather than enforce the new Prohibition law.^[6] Buford would publish a Virginia Law Review article about that U.S. Constitutional Amendment in 1928, having previously published an article about the Federal Employer's Liability Act in the Harvard Law Review in 1914, and in the 1920s five speeches in Virginia bar publications. Meanwhile, in 1885, his lawyer father had become a judge for Brunswick County, and briefly served in the Virginia House of Delegates in 1893.^[7] While Brunswick voters had not re-elected delegate Frank Buford in 1895, in 1897 this man (his son) was elected as their part-time representative in the Virginia House of Delegates, electorally defeating his father's successor.^[8]

Decades later, in 1919 (after his resignation as prosecutor and long after adoption of a new state constitution in 1902 created circuit courts and a decade after his father's death), this man again ran for Brunswick County's legislative seat, and again served one term.^[9] During that legislative term, his native Brunswick County experienced its last illegal lynching, as a crowd lynched one of two men from Norfolk who had encountered the postmaster of the Tobacco store and post office walking home, robbed and murdered him,^[10] not long after a similar incident in Dinwiddie County. Within days, sheriffs from the two counties had apprehended two suspects wearing the postmaster's watch and clothing from the store. However, they encountered a crowd, which lynched one man in front of that store before the postmaster's funeral.^[11] The sheriffs had managed to escape with the other man, who was ultimately tried, convicted and executed in Richmond. Local ministers had condemned the lynching, but the grand jury ultimately secured no indictments for that crime.^[12][13] In 1922 Buford became the president of the Virginia State Bar.^[14]

After that second legislative term, on May 22, 1924, Buford was the main speaker at the dedication of a historical marker at Fort Christanna by the Society of the Colonial Dames of America, which had acquired approximately 3 acres of land from what had long been called the "Fort Hill" plantation, and which centuries earlier had been Fort Christanna.^[15] Before his speech, the platform erected for the distinguished guests, including Lyon Gardiner Tyler, Rev. Bland Tucker and a group of Pamunkey Native Americans from King William County dressed in full regalia, the platform collapsed, but no one was hurt, and Buford delivered his address.^[16]

Buford committed suicide with a shotgun blast to his head on October 26, 1931, about 2 months shy of his 66th birthday, and was buried in the family cemetery at Sherwood.^[17][18] Thus, his sister Elizabeth, who had lived with him at Sherwood during the last federal census of his lifetime, became the last surviving Buford sibling.^[19] During the Great Depression, which had begun by that time, land prices plummeted and four banks failed in Lawrenceville, with only the Farmers and Merchants Bank of Broadnax branch remaining by 1937.^[20]