Appalachian Figures
A Whitley County Birth, A Life Between Mountains And City
In the summer of 1938, a boy named Frank F. Drowota III entered the world in Williamsburg, the seat of Whitley County, Kentucky. An official memorial resolution adopted by the Tennessee Judicial Conference records his birth as July 10, 1938, in Williamsburg, and identifies him as the second child of Dr. Frank F. Drowota Jr. and Vivian Russell Drowota. Other official documents, including a Tennessee General Assembly resolution from 2006 written near the end of his judicial career, give his birth date as July 7, 1938. Funeral records and online obituary listings follow that July 7 date as well.
For historians, that three day discrepancy is a reminder that even very public lives can leave behind slightly crooked paper trails. What the sources agree on is the core Appalachian fact. A future chief justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court began life in a small Cumberland foothills town whose courthouse looks out toward the ridges that divide Kentucky from Tennessee.
Frank’s Whitley County roots run through his parents’ story. His father, Dr. Frank F. Drowota Jr., trained for the ministry and soon accepted a call that would pull the family southward. According to the Judicial Conference memorial, in 1943 Dr. Drowota became the founding minister of Woodmont Christian Church in Nashville and moved there with his wife and children, including five year old Frankie. Oral history interviews with Dr. Drowota in the Nashville Public Library collections preserve his memories of that church work and of Nashville in the mid twentieth century, situating the family at the intersection of small town Kentucky origins and a fast growing Tennessee city.
The Tennessee courts’ own remembrance of Frank F. Drowota III emphasizes how thoroughly that move shaped him. It recalls that the family lived inside the Woodmont church building for several years before a proper parsonage was built and notes that his parents once hoped he would follow his father into the ministry. Instead, the boy from Williamsburg grew into a Nashville teenager whose calling lay in law and public service rather than the pulpit, even as he carried his father’s example of quiet, persistent leadership into every courtroom he entered.
From Navy Officer To The Youngest Chancellor In Tennessee
Most public biographies agree on the broad outline of his early adulthood. Frank graduated from Montgomery Bell Academy in 1956, then earned a Bachelor of Arts in history and political science from Vanderbilt University in 1960. That blend of history and politics would serve a future appellate judge well. Immediately after college he served as a naval officer on the USS Shangri La from 1960 to 1962, an experience his obituary notes with pride. After returning to Nashville he entered Vanderbilt Law School, completed his J.D. in 1965, and began private practice.
The memorial resolution and legislative tributes both emphasize how quickly he moved from practice to the bench. In 1970, at just thirty one, he was appointed chancellor of the Davidson County Chancery Court, reportedly the youngest person to hold that position. Four years later Governor Winfield Dunn elevated him to the Tennessee Court of Appeals. In 1980, after a decade as a trial and appellate judge, he was elected to the Tennessee Supreme Court, becoming the youngest justice ever to sit there.
The 2005 to 2006 Tennessee Blue Book, whose preface is dedicated to him, and the Annual Reports of the Tennessee Judiciary both underline the arc of that career. The Blue Book dedication calls him a true gentleman and notes that he became one of the longest serving justices in state history. A later annual report, summarizing his retirement, points out that by 2005 he was the longest serving active judge in Tennessee, outranking more than 180 colleagues by years on the bench. Vanderbilt’s obituary similarly remarks that his twenty five years on the Supreme Court make him the second longest serving justice in Tennessee history.
For Appalachian history, it matters that this long judicial career grew from a childhood that began in Whitley County. The boy born downtown in a courthouse town beside the Cumberland River found his life work interpreting statutes, precedents, and constitutions that governed people in places like Williamsburg as much as in Nashville.
On The Supreme Court: McIntyre v. Balentine And The Shape Of Tennessee Law
Frank F. Drowota III served on the Tennessee Supreme Court from 1980 until his retirement in 2005. His colleagues twice elected him chief justice, first from 1989 to 1990 and again beginning in 2001. During that quarter century he signed his name to at least one thousand majority opinions and authored more than one hundred concurring and dissenting opinions, according to the Judicial Conference memorial resolution.
One case in particular became shorthand for his influence. In McIntyre v. Balentine, 833 S.W.2d 52 (Tenn. 1992), Justice Drowota wrote for a unanimous court that Tennessee would abandon the old rule of pure contributory negligence and adopt a system of modified comparative fault. Under the former rule, a plaintiff who was even slightly negligent could be barred from any recovery. McIntyre replaced that all or nothing approach with one that allowed recovery reduced in proportion to the plaintiff’s share of fault, so long as the plaintiff was not at least as responsible as the defendant.
Later commentary on Tennessee tort law has repeatedly cited McIntyre as a turning point, and one summary of reform efforts notes that the decision effectively ended the application of joint and several liability in many cases. The judiciary’s own retrospective, in the 2004 to 2005 Annual Report of the Tennessee Judiciary, remarks that Drowota himself regarded McIntyre as the most broadly significant opinion he ever wrote because it overhauled tort law across the state.
McIntyre did not stand alone. During his years on the court he helped decide controversies involving death penalty procedures, municipal incorporation fights remembered as the tiny towns lawsuits, frozen embryos, school finance, and the boundaries of state constitutional protections. The legislative resolution honoring his retirement lists that range of subjects as evidence of how deeply he shaped Tennessee doctrine in both civil and criminal law. A later tribute in the American Inns of Court magazine, written by one of his former law clerks, concluded that he probably had as much or more influence on the shape of Tennessee law as any justice who has ever served on the Supreme Court.
A Judge Who Thought Like A Historian
Frank Drowota was not content to let others write the history of the court he served. In a Tennessee Bar Journal article titled Recent Tennessee Supreme Courts Have Had Distinct Qualities he looked back over several generations of justices and described the particular strengths and styles of the courts he had known. Later benchbooks and law review articles cite that piece as an insider’s guide to modern Tennessee judicial history, proof that the Williamsburg born chief justice saw himself as a caretaker of institutional memory.
He also helped build formal structures for that memory. The Tennessee Supreme Court Historical Society lists him among its founding members and long time supporters. Its newsletters from the early twenty first century chronicle his role in promoting publications, banquets, and educational programs that would keep the stories of earlier justices alive. Those same newsletters preserve posed photographs of the court across the 1980s and 1990s, with Drowota sometimes in the middle as chief justice and sometimes on the wing, but always present.
The Tennessee Bar Foundation’s Legal History Project adds another primary layer. In March 2006, shortly before his retirement, George T. Buck Lewis III interviewed him at length for the project, creating a two part oral history that is available through the Foundation’s site. In that conversation he reflected on his childhood, his naval service, campaign style judicial elections, and the internal dynamics of the Supreme Court. For historians of Kentucky and Tennessee Appalachia, the interview is especially valuable because it is one of the few extended times when the justice himself narrates how a boy from Williamsburg grew into a statewide judicial leader.
The sense of history ran in the family. The oral history with his father, Dr. Frank F. Drowota Jr., recorded by their granddaughter Helen in 1980, captures an earlier generation’s voice and reminds listeners that the Nashville pastor at the center of the story remained, in his own memories, a man rooted in the culture of the Upper South that stretches from Whitley County to Davidson County.
Service, Faith, And The Drowota Award
Obituaries, memorial resolutions, and law school tributes agree that Frank F. Drowota III saw judicial work as one strand in a larger life of service. The memorial resolution of the Tennessee Judicial Conference highlights his leadership in the Tennessee Judicial Conference itself, his efforts to improve court administration, and his role in judicial education programs. His funeral home obituary and the Legacy.com reprint emphasize that he served as president of the Nashville Rotary Club and local Red Cross chapter, chaired the Middle Tennessee YMCA and its Camp Widgiwagan board, sat on the boards of Montgomery Bell Academy, the Frist Foundation, and the Nashville School of Law, and continued to teach children’s Sunday School at Woodmont Christian Church until shortly before his death.
The Tennessee courts’ own remembrance records that he died at home in Nashville on April 15, 2018, at age seventy nine, and notes that colleagues described him as humble, hardworking, and devoted to the ideal of impartial courts. His obituary makes plain that he died from ALS, a detail that added weight to later tributes discussing his courage in the face of a terminal illness.
In 2006, even before he left the bench, the Tennessee Bar Association created the Justice Frank F. Drowota III Outstanding Judicial Service Award, its highest award for service to the judiciary. He received the inaugural award himself. Later recipients include appellate and trial judges from across Tennessee, and recent TBA law blog posts and class notes continue to mark each presentation as a way of honoring his standard of integrity and diligence.
More recently, access to justice leaders in Tennessee announced the creation of the Justice Frank F. Drowota Trust, designed to provide supplemental funding for legal services and access initiatives in his name. Taken together, the award and the trust mean that a man born in a southeastern Kentucky county seat now lends his name to concrete efforts to make courts more accessible for ordinary Tennesseans.
A Whitley County Legacy
Frank F. Drowota III is usually remembered as a Nashville figure and a Tennessee judge, but the primary records never let us forget that the route to the Tennessee Supreme Court began in Whitley County. The Judicial Conference memorial resolution, the Tennessee General Assembly’s retirement resolution, and the Tennessee courts’ own obituary all begin his story the same way. They identify him as born in Williamsburg, Kentucky, the son of a minister who would later found Woodmont Christian Church.
Because those documents reflect slightly different birth dates, they invite local researchers in Williamsburg to turn to their own records. A birth certificate from 1938, church membership rolls, and entries in the 1940 United States census can help resolve the July 7 versus July 10 question and further anchor the Drowota family in Whitley County before their move to Nashville in 1943. The very need to cross check those sources illustrates how Appalachian history often works. Families that straddle the state line leave traces in both Kentucky and Tennessee archives, and the work of tying those traces together falls partly to local historians and genealogists.
For AppalachianHistorian.org, the story of Chief Justice Frank F. Drowota III shows how a life can remain Appalachian even when most of its public chapters unfold elsewhere. A boy whose earliest memories likely included the brick streets and river fog of Williamsburg grew up to spend nights on the deck of a Navy carrier, days in Nashville law offices, and decades shaping statewide law from a marble bench in the Tennessee Supreme Court building. Yet every time a Tennessee lawyer cites McIntyre v. Balentine, every time a judge receives the Drowota Award, and every time a young attorney watches his oral history interview, they are engaging the legacy of someone whose story begins in a small courthouse town in the Cumberland foothills.
Sources & Further Reading
Memorial Resolution, Chief Justice Frank F. Drowota III, 1938 to 2018, Tennessee Judicial Conference, available as a PDF on the Tennessee courts site, for an official narrative of his life and career and statistics on his judicial work.Tennessee Courts+1
Senate Joint Resolution 587 (2006), Tennessee General Assembly, honoring Chief Justice Frank F. Drowota III at his retirement and providing biographical details including his birth in Williamsburg, Kentucky, and his early judicial appointments.Tennessee General Assembly+1
Tennessee Blue Book 2005 to 2006, preface dedicated to the Honorable Frank F. Drowota III, and the Annual Reports of the Tennessee Judiciary from the early 2000s, which document his service as chief justice and describe McIntyre v. Balentine as his most broadly significant opinion.Share Tennessee Government+2Tennessee Courts+2
McIntyre v. Balentine, 833 S.W.2d 52 (Tenn. 1992), opinion of the Tennessee Supreme Court authored by Justice Frank F. Drowota III, adopting a modified comparative fault regime in Tennessee and reshaping state tort law.Justia+1
Tennessee Bar Foundation Legal History Project, Justice Frank F. Drowota III interviews (Part 1 and Part 2), conducted March 18, 2006 by George T. Buck Lewis III, available via the Foundation’s website and YouTube, offering first person reflections on his life and the work of the court.Tennessee Bar Foundation+1
Oral history interview with Dr. Frank F. Drowota Jr., Nashville Public Library Special Collections, 1980, documenting the ministry of the founding pastor of Woodmont Christian Church and providing family context for the justice’s early life.Nashville CONTENTdm+1
Obituary for Honorable Frank F. Drowota III, Marshall Donnelly Combs Funeral Home and reprinted on Legacy.com, along with the Tennessee courts’ Remembering Former Chief Justice Frank Drowota article and Vanderbilt University’s Passages tribute, for additional biographical details and assessments of his legacy.Legacy+3Dignity Memorial+3Tennessee Courts+3
Lisa Rippy and Marshall Davidson, The Retirement of Chief Justice Frank F. Drowota, III: A Tribute to a Legal Legend and All Around Nice Guy, Tennessee Journal of Law and Policy 3, no. 1 (2006), and Marshall L. Davidson III, The Power of a Mentor (2019), for secondary reflections on his influence on Tennessee law and on later generations of judges and lawyers.ir.law.utk.edu+1
Tennessee Bar Association, Justice Frank F. Drowota III Outstanding Judicial Service Award information and Drowota Award recipients list, along with the 2023 and 2024 TBA law blog posts on the Justice Frank F. Drowota Trust, for evidence of how his name continues to shape judicial service and access to justice efforts in Tennessee.TBA+2TBA+2