M. L. Wright

SOURCE: The Goodspeed Publishing Co., 1889
Contributed by Michael Brown
18 Oct 1998

---------------------------------------------------------------------- CRAWFORD COUNTY
page 1219

M. L. Wright, grocer and liquor dealer, was born in Johnson County, Ark., in 1854, and is a son of Dr. J. M. and Vienna (Miller) Wright, natives of Tennessee and Georgia, respectively, who, when young, accompanied their parents to Arkansas. The mother died in 1865, and the father is now living with his third wife. Before his marriage he attended lectures at the Missouri Medical College in St. Louis, afterward practiced his profession, and during the war served as surgeon in the army. For the past fourteen years he has practiced law in Crawford, Sebastian, Logan, Franklin, Johnson and Pope Counties, with his office at Alma. He has for ten years been justice of the peace in this county, but now resides in Franklin County. He is of Scotch-Irish and English extraction. His father, Silas C. Wright, came to Arkansas from Virginia when it was still a Territory, and served as sheriff of Johnson County. He died in Pope County in 1872. Our subject spent his boyhood at home, where he received a common-school education, and at the age of seventeen began life for himself by farming. In 1876 he went into the grocery business at Alma, and in 1877 into the liquor business. Selling out in 1878, he clerked in a general store for eighteen months, and in 1881 and 1882 was in the liquor business at Van Buren. Returning to Alma he established a grocery store. In 1883 he started another saloon, and a year ago also engaged in the grocery business again. His stock is valued at about $5,000, and he is a prosperous citizen. He is a Democrat, cast his first presidential vote for Tilden, and in 1868 was elected clerk of Crawford County, serving two years. He was chief of police in Van Buren four years, and has also held that position in Alma. When a young man he edited one of the first papers published in the county, at a time when Van Buren was built of log cabins, and has been one of the leading men of that place, having [p.1219] been in business there for about thirty years. He now owns about fourteen dwellings there, and has two business houses and one residence in Alma. He is one of the directors of the Crawford County Bank. April 13, 1879, he married Lillie B. Bowlin, who was born in Van Buren April 2, 1860, being a daughter of William and Lemantha Bowlin; she is the mother of one child. During the war Mr Bowlin served in the Federal army in the First Arkansas Infantry, being the commander of Company A, and operated in Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana.