William G. Whipple

William G. Whipple was mayor of Little Rock from 1887 to 1891, and United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas from 1900 to 1913. He ran unsuccessfully for governor of the state as a Republican in 1892.

Whipple's mayoral administration introduced electric lighting to the city beginning on September 1, 1887, paved many streets with granite and macadam, created sixty miles of new brick and concrete sidewalks, and introduced a steam dummy railway.

Whipple was born at Warehouse Point in Connecticut on August 4, 1834. His parents were William J. Whipple and Permelia Cook (Woodward) Whipple. He graduated from Wilbraham Academy in Massachusetts and Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. He studied law at the Albany Law School in Albany, New York, before moving to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to practice. In 1868 he moved to Little Rock.

He married Mary S. Dodge, daughter of Little Rock physician and temperance advocate Roderick Lathrop Dodge, in 1870.

References

• "The Arkansas Campaign; Opened with Speeches by Three Gubernatorial Candidates," New York Times, July 18, 1892.
• Goodspeed's History of Pulaski County, Arkansas (1889).