Tom Miller Mehaffy

Tom Miller Mehaffy was associate justice of the Supreme Court of Arkansas and an attorney in the general practice firm of Mehaffy, Reid, Donham & Mehaffy of Little Rock, Arkansas. Partners in the firm were Mehaffy, Charles Chester Reid, William Robert Donham, and James William Mehaffy.

The firm served as counsel to the American Bauxite Company, Standard Oil Company of Louisiana, Wells Fargo & Company, Hayes Grain, and the Missouri Pacific Railroad. Offices of the firm were located at 715-721 the Boyle Building.

Mehaffy was born in Ripley, Tippah County, Mississippi, on October 3, 1859, to T. L. Mehaffy and R. B. Mehaffy. His father fought in the Confederate Army of Georgia, dying in the war of measles. Tom Mehaffy supported his mother and sister with farm laborer wages until he was ninteen years of age, when he enrolled at Benton High School. He was admitted to the bar in 1888 or 1889, and soon thereafter opened a law practice in Benton.

He was a member of the Arkansas legislature in 1889, a state senator from 1893 to 1895, and president and delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1918.

Mehaffy's home at 2102 Louisiana Street in the Quapaw Quarter of Little Rock served as the fictional residence of Wood and Ava Newton on the 1990s CBS sitcom Evening Shade.

References

• Goodspeed's History of Arkansas (1890), 291-292.
• James Clark Fifield, The American Bar (Minneapolis, MN: The James C. Fifield Company, 1918), 31.