E. Volney Bingham: justice of the peace, postmaster, state senator

1844 – 1907

The township's lawyer: The fullest single service career the nineteenth-century record gives Mishawaka belongs to a Penn Township farm boy. E. Volney Bingham was born 1 August 1844 in Penn township, his father an early settler associated with the St. Joseph Iron Works; he worked in a furniture factory, read toward the law, and at the Civil War's opening put the law aside and enlisted, becoming sergeant major of the Forty-eighth Indiana — the war service is the Wars section's; what followed is this section's. Home again, he clerked, traveled as a salesman, studied law at last, and was elected justice of the peace on the Democratic ticket in a strong Republican township, holding the township's bench twelve years; admitted to the bar of St. Joseph County in 1875, he built the practice the county history calls prosperous. In December 1872 he married Hattie E. Grimes, daughter of one of Mishawaka's old physicians.

Postmaster and senator: During Cleveland's administration — Howard does not say which of the two — Bingham served as postmaster of Mishawaka, the federal desk of the entry below. In 1894 he was the Democratic candidate for circuit judge for St. Joseph and LaPorte counties, and lost, as the candidacy's printing without a service implies. The statehouse line is his: he was made state senator for St. Joseph and Starke counties in 1892, succeeding Timothy E. Howard — the county's own historian — on Howard's promotion to the Indiana Supreme Court; he chaired the Committee on State's Prisons in the legislature of 1903, sat on the committees on criminal code, public morals, constitutional revision and the organization of courts, and in November 1906 was returned to the senate, Howard writing that in his re-election "the Republican majority was reversed." Soldier, township justice, postmaster, nearly the circuit judge, and fourteen years a state senator by the time the county history closed its account in 1907: the nineteenth-century Mishawaka servant at full size, and the measure against which this section's thinner entries are honestly thin.

Sources:

1. Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), vol. 2 — the biography of Hon. E. Volney Bingham: born 1 August 1844, Penn township; sergeant major, 48th Indiana; justice of the peace twelve years; admitted to the bar 1875; postmaster of Mishawaka during Cleveland's administration; state senator 1892, succeeding Judge Howard; prisons committee chairman 1903; returned November 1906; Democratic candidate for circuit judge 1894; marriage, December 1872.