1925 Biography - Oliver C. Dawkins

Oliver C. Dawkins. A lawyer admitted to practice in Louisiana since 1886, Oliver C. Dawkins, for many years has been a resident of the City of Monroe, and while an editor and publisher there for some years, has been primarily engaged in his law practice. It is doubtful if any other family in Louisiana has given more prominent names to the profession of law and public life of the state than that of Dawkins.

Oliver C. Dawkins was born in Union Parish, fourteen miles north of Farmerville. in 1859, son of Duncan Douglas and Margaret (Brooks-Thompson) Dawkins. The Dawkins family is of English ancestry. They first settled in Maryland in Colonial days and from that colony moved out to the South and Southwest. Duncan Douglas Dawkins was a native of South Carolina, and coming west he first settled in Lauderdale County, Mississippi, later removed to Arkansas, where he married Margaret (Brooks) Thompson, his second wife, and finally settled on a farm in Union Parish, Louisiana, where their son, Oliver C., was born.

A nephew of Oliver C. Dawkins is Judge B. C. Dawkins, formerly judge of the Supreme Court of Louisiana and now federal district judge of the United States Court for the Western District of Louisiana. An older brother of the Monroe attorney was Judge R. B. Dawkins, who died in 1922 after a conspicuous career as a member of the North Louisiana bar, practicing at Farmerville and who Served as judge of the Circuit Court of Appeals of the Northern District of Louisiana. Another brother was the late J. M. Dawkins, who was clerk of the court for Union Parish, with home at Farmerville, where his son, H. H. Dawkins, is practicing law,

Oliver C. Dawkins attended common schools in Union Parish and finished his literary education in the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. He taught school and read law in Union Parish, and in October, 1886, was admitted to the bar before the Supreme Court of Louisiana. The same year he engaged in Practice at Farmerville, the parish seat, and from there on January 1, 1897, moved to Monroe. During the next nine years he gave much of his time to his time as editor of the Monroe Evening News. Since 1936 he has devoted himself without outside interests or interruptions to the successful practice of the law. He is senior member of the firm of Dawkins & Dawkins, the junior partner being his son, Joe B. Dawkins.

Oliver C. Dawkins married Miss Jessie Thompson, of Union Parish. Their children are: Bruton C., a lawyer at Alexandria; Joe, a partner of his father; Lamar, in business at Detroit, Michigan; Frank, an electrical engineer with the New Orleans Public Service Corporation; and Olive, wife of L. H. Trigg, of New Orleans, and 0. C. Dawkins, Jr., a reporter on the News-Star of Monroe, Louisiana.

Contributed 2021 Nov 04 by Mike Miller, from A History of Louisiana, by Henry E. Chambers, published in 1925, volume 2, page 237.