Appalachian Figures
In the winter of 1907 a quiet judge from St. Joseph took his seat on the Supreme Court of Missouri. On paper he was a Midwestern Democrat with a farm upbringing, a Washington University law degree, and a reputation for careful rulings in railroad and criminal cases. Yet the official manual that introduced him to Missouri voters began with a different place: Knox County, Kentucky.
Archelaus Marius Woodson spent nearly all of his life in Missouri, but he was born in the hill country around Barbourville and carried into the courts of a western state the name of one of Knox County’s most tangled political families. His story belongs both to Missouri legal history and to the long Appalachian migration that scattered Knox County people westward along the rivers.
From Knox County to the Missouri River country
The most straightforward account of his beginnings comes from the 1907–1908 Missouri Official Manual. In a short biographical sketch, the state printer described “Archelaus M. Woodson, St. Joseph (Democrat)” as having been born in Knox County, Kentucky, on 30 January 1854, the son of Benjamin J. Woodson Sr., who was himself a brother of future Missouri governor Silas Woodson.
The manual emphasizes that this was not a family that drifted slowly west. It records that Benjamin J. Woodson left Kentucky and “located in Buchanan county, Missouri, on October 30, 1854, when Judge Woodson was nine months old,” and notes that the boy “has, therefore, lived in Missouri practically all his life and was reared on the farm.” An earlier biographical sketch in A. J. D. Stewart’s History of the Bench and Bar of Missouri fills in the missing Appalachian side. Stewart places both father and son’s births in Knox County and situates Benjamin’s move west as part of a family migration from Virginia into southeastern Kentucky and then on to the Missouri River country.
Stewart’s sketch is explicit that Archelaus was born in Knox County on 30 January 1854, that the family moved first to a farm near Lexington in Lafayette County when he was an infant, and that by the fall of 1855 they had resettled near Sparta in Buchanan County. There the boy grew up in a landscape that felt more like the prairies than the Cumberland hills, “attending the district school in winter and assisting with the farm work in summer,” but with parents and grandparents whose stories still pointed back toward Knox County and older Virginia kin.
A Woodson of Knox County and Buchanan County
The Bench and Bar volume and a cluster of family histories make clear that Archelaus was not simply a lone migrant who happened to be born in Kentucky. He belonged to a wide Woodson network that linked Knox County to Virginia gentry lines and to other public figures in Missouri. Stewart traces the family back to John Woodson of Dorsetshire, who settled in Virginia in 1624, and notes that later generations “intermarried with almost every leading family of Virginia and Kentucky,” including the Lewises, Tuckers, Ferrises, Nethertons, and Crittendens.
Lucy Henderson Horton’s early twentieth century Family History Compiled, written from the perspective of the Hughes and Winston kin, lists “Judge Archelaus Woodson, of the Supreme Bench of Missouri” as one of the living representatives of the Hughes–Woodson line and identifies him and his brothers as children of Margaret Hughes Woodson. Brief Sketches of the Randolphs and Their Connections likewise names “Judge A. M. Woodson, Supreme Court of Missouri” among the descendants of the Randolph–Woodson connection, tying a St. Joseph jurist not only to Knox County farmers but to the same extended kin network that produced Thomas Jefferson.
Together these genealogies show that when Benjamin and Margaret Woodson left Knox County in 1854 they carried with them more than a young son. They carried a name already freighted with colonial Virginia stories, Randolph cousins, and Knox County connections to figures like Governor Silas B. Woodson. Later county histories in Missouri would routinely mention the governor and the judge in the same breath, one as chief executive of the state, the other as a circuit and supreme court judge whose work helped shape Buchanan County’s legal culture.
Farm boy, law student, and St. Joseph lawyer
By the time he was eighteen, according to the Official Manual, Woodson had completed his education in Buchanan County’s public schools. In 1873 he left the family farm and entered Plattsburg College in Clinton County, where he completed the prescribed course of study before moving on to Washington University’s law department in St. Louis. Stewart notes that he was admitted to the bar at Platte City in April 1876, even before finishing his formal legal education, and that he graduated from the St. Louis law school in 1877.
The Bench and Bar sketch describes him beginning practice in St. Louis, then returning in 1883 to Platte City and, the following year, moving to St. Joseph. There he joined a Woodson cluster that included his brothers Stephen C. Woodson, president of the Saxton National Bank, Dr. C. R. Woodson, superintendent of the state’s second insane asylum, attorney B. J. Woodson Jr., and other siblings who had all followed their parents west from Kentucky.
On 13 April 1886 he married Elizabeth “Bettie” Oliver of Platte City. Both the Official Manual and Stewart agree on the date and place of the marriage and note that the couple had three children, usually listed as Lorene M., Archelaus M. Jr., and Helen E. It was a household rooted in Missouri, but one that genealogists like Horton would keep insisting on placing inside the older Hughes and Woodson lines that ran back through Knox County to colonial Virginia.
Letters to a governor and the making of a circuit judge
The turning point in Woodson’s public career came in December 1889, when a vacancy opened on the Buchanan County circuit bench. Local and regional elites quickly began writing to Governor David R. Francis. The finding aid for Francis’s papers at the Missouri State Archives lists a flurry of letters from December 1890 in which judges, lawyers, and party leaders from Buchanan, Platte, and other counties recommended “A. M. Woodson of St. Joseph” to succeed Judge Oliver M. Spencer.
Among those letters were endorsements from figures like R. H. Faucett and Abe Furst, St. Joseph attorneys who vouched for Woodson’s learning and character. The archives also preserve an April 15, 1892, letter from “Archelaus Marius Woodson, St. Joseph, Buchanan County” to Governor Francis, written while Woodson was serving on the bench. Although the catalog entries do not reproduce the full text, they confirm that the Knox County native was now corresponding directly with the governor about judicial matters and that he appeared in the governor’s papers both as a recommended appointee and as an established judge.
Governor Francis appointed him circuit judge of Buchanan County on 18 December 1889 for a two year term. Stewart reports that Woodson was elected to a full six year term in 1892, reelected in 1898, and that as a trial judge he earned “a reputation for fairness” and produced decisions that were rarely reversed on appeal. The Official Manual later condensed that narrative into a few lines, noting the same appointment and election dates and using them to introduce him as a candidate for the Supreme Court.
In this phase of his career he appears in the law reports as “WOODSON, J.” in opinions that higher courts reviewed and sometimes corrected, cases like State ex rel. Ballew v. Woodson, which carried his name into the Missouri Reports as a shorthand for the Buchanan County circuit court itself. For Buchanan County residents, he was by then far more a St. Joseph judge than a Knox County boy, but his official biographies never stopped reminding readers that he had been born in Kentucky.
On the Missouri Supreme Court
In November 1906 voters elected Woodson to the Supreme Court of Missouri for what contemporaries called the “long term,” and the Official Manual records that he was reelected in 1916 for another ten year term. The Missouri Secretary of State’s official list of judges places “Archelaus Marius Woodson, Buchanan” on the high court from 1907 to 1925 and shows that he twice served as presiding judge under the system that rotated that role among the seven justices.
The obituary that ran in the St. Louis Post Dispatch in November 1925, summarized in later references and in the Wikipedia article on Woodson, stressed that he had spent nineteen years on the Supreme Court bench before his death. The Neosho Times gave similar dates and noted that he died in a Kansas City hospital at age seventy one, still in service, after a long illness.
From the perspective of later court historians, Woodson’s record as a justice looks uneven. Gerald T. Dunne, in his study The Missouri Supreme Court: From Dred Scott to Nancy, wrote that Woodson “had the good fortune of writing one of the great libertarian opinions of his court in the course of an otherwise undistinguished career,” a judgment that both criticizes and praises him in a single sentence. Yet even that assessment recognizes that at least once, in a case that began far from the Cumberlands, a Knox County native left a lasting mark on American ideas of liberty.
Ex parte Nelson and a mountain sense of liberty
The decision Dunne had in mind was Ex parte Nelson, a 1913 habeas corpus case involving contempt by publication. A lower court had jailed a man for what it viewed as contemptuous criticism in print. Woodson’s opinion for the Supreme Court scrutinized the contempt power and concluded that the imprisonment could not stand.
Later law review writers, including J. W. Oliver in a 1962 Missouri Law Review article on contempt by publication, treated Ex parte Nelson as an important precursor to modern First Amendment doctrine. They pointed out that Woodson’s opinion insisted on procedural safeguards and warned against using contempt proceedings as a shortcut around the usual protections of criminal law. The case has continued to appear in footnotes and discussions of press freedom because it framed the contempt power in narrow terms and treated criticism of judges, however sharp, as something that had to be handled with care.
For an Appalachian audience, it is tempting to see in Ex parte Nelson a hint of the same suspicion of unchecked power that runs through mountain political folklore. There is no evidence that Woodson consciously drew on Knox County memories when he drafted the opinion, but his path from a farm near Sparta to the highest court of his adopted state had been shaped by communities that disliked arbitrary authority and watched their officeholders closely. In Ex parte Nelson a boy born in the hills of southeastern Kentucky found himself telling a Midwestern court that even judges must respect legal limits when they punish speech.
Woodson also wrote other significant opinions, including cases that ousted Standard Oil from the state for antitrust violations and that blocked Democratic officials from redrawing Missouri’s senatorial districts in ways the court found unlawful. Taken together, those rulings show a justice who could, at times, put legal limits ahead of partisan convenience, even though he was himself a Democrat and owed his original circuit appointment to a Democratic governor.
Letters with Theodore Roosevelt and a national network
One of the more surprising windows into Woodson’s world comes far from Jefferson City. In the spring of 1910 he wrote to former president Theodore Roosevelt, who was just back from his African tour and still one of the most influential political voices in the country. The Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University and the Library of Congress Manuscript Division preserve that letter and Roosevelt’s reply of 6 April 1910.
The surviving correspondence is brief, but its existence matters. It shows that a judge from St. Joseph, known in Missouri as a conservative Democrat and church member, was also connected enough to write directly to Roosevelt and receive a personal answer. The index page for “Recipient: Woodson, Archelaus M.” in the Roosevelt Center’s digital library gathers the catalog entries and dates those letters to March and April 1910, placing the exchange squarely in the turbulent Taft–Roosevelt era when national politics were rearranging themselves around progressivism and party splits.
What the letters remind us is that Appalachian-born figures like Woodson did not simply vanish into western towns. They carried their networks with them. By 1910 the boy whose birth the Official Manual still described as having occurred in Knox County was writing from St. Joseph to a former president and receiving replies filed away in the Library of Congress.
Death, burial, and the memory of a Knox County judge
Woodson’s life ended in the autumn of 1925. Newspaper accounts reported that he died in a Kansas City hospital in mid November at the age of seventy one, still officially listed as a resident of St. Joseph and still a member of the Supreme Court. The St. Louis Post Dispatch’s story carried the headline “A. M. Woodson, On Supreme Bench 19 Years, Dies” and emphasized his long service and his family’s legal prominence.Wikipedia
The Neosho Times account, cited in later scholarship, described his funeral arrangements and noted that he would be buried in Mount Mora Cemetery at St. Joseph, the resting place of many of the city’s leading families. The cemetery’s own records list “Archelaus Marius Woodson” with a 1925 death date and an interment in mid-November, giving an independent confirmation of his age and place of death even as sources differ slightly over the exact day.
Genealogical compilers on sites like Find A Grave and FamilySearch have since linked him back to Benjamin Jourdan Woodson and to earlier Knox County and Virginia generations, sometimes with conflicting details about his birthplace. When these derivative trees are checked against the Official Manual and the Bench and Bar sketch, however, the weight of the primary and near primary printed sources points firmly to Knox County, Kentucky, as his place of birth and to Buchanan County, Missouri, as the landscape where he spent almost all of his days.
For Appalachian history, that combination matters. In the nineteenth century Knox County sent sons into Kentucky law and politics, into the Confederate and Union armies, and into the coalfields. It also sent the infant Archelaus Marius Woodson west in his mother’s arms, to grow up on a Missouri farm and to write, decades later, a habeas corpus opinion that scholars would call one of the great libertarian decisions of his court.
Sources & Further Reading
Missouri Official Manual, 1907–1908. The judicial section includes a short biography of “Archelaus M. Woodson, St. Joseph (Democrat),” noting his birth in Knox County, Kentucky on 30 January 1854, his family’s move to Buchanan County on 30 October 1854, his education at Plattsburg College and St. Louis Law School, his appointment and election as circuit judge, and his election and reelection to the Supreme Court.Internet Archive
A. J. D. Stewart, The History of the Bench and Bar of Missouri (St. Louis, 1898), pp. 660–661. Provides a near contemporary biographical sketch of Archelaus Marius Woodson, including his Knox County birth, his family’s settlement near Sparta in Buchanan County, his schooling, law studies, early practice, and appointment as circuit judge, along with genealogical notes on the Woodson family.Internet Archive
Missouri Secretary of State, “Judges of the Supreme Court of Missouri 1820–2011” and later judicial branch chapters in the Blue Book series. These official lists place “Archelaus Marius Woodson, Buchanan” on the Supreme Court from 1907 to 1925 and give his party affiliation and division assignment, confirming the dates of service found in newspapers and biographies.Missouri Secretary of State+1
Missouri State Archives, Records of Governor David Rowland Francis (RG 3.27). The finding aid and digital catalog entries identify recommendation letters from R. H. Faucett, Abe Furst, and others supporting Woodson’s appointment as circuit judge in 1890, along with an April 15, 1892, letter from “Archelaus Marius Woodson, St. Joseph, Buchanan County” to Governor Francis about judicial business.
Theodore Roosevelt Center, “Recipient: Woodson, Archelaus M.” digital index, with linked images and transcripts of a March 1910 letter from Woodson to Theodore Roosevelt and Roosevelt’s reply of 6 April 1910, held in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division. These letters document Woodson’s place in early twentieth century national political correspondence.Internet Archive
Ex parte Nelson, 251 Mo. 63, 157 S.W. 794 (Mo. 1913), and J. W. Oliver, “Contempt by Publication and the First Amendment,” Missouri Law Review (1962). The opinion itself and later legal commentary treat Woodson’s decision as a significant limitation on the contempt power in cases involving criticism of courts, and Gerald T. Dunne’s The Missouri Supreme Court: From Dred Scott to Nancy highlights Ex parte Nelson as one of the court’s “great libertarian” opinions.Wikipedia+2Facebook+2
Lucy Henderson Horton, Family History Compiled, and Brief Sketches of the Randolphs and Their Connections. These genealogical works connect Judge Archelaus M. Woodson of the Missouri Supreme Court to the Hughes–Woodson–Winston and Randolph lines, reinforcing the Knox County and Virginia context found in the bench and bar biography.Internet Archive+2Internet Archive+2
Newspaper obituaries such as “A. M. Woodson, On Supreme Bench 19 Years, Dies,” St. Louis Post Dispatch, 16 November 1925, and “Judge Woodson Dies In Kansas City,” The Neosho Times, 19 November 1925, along with regional coverage summarized in later references, provide accounts of his death in Kansas City, his long tenure on the Supreme Court, and his burial in Mount Mora Cemetery at St. Joseph.Wikipedia+1