Escambia County AlArchives Biographies.....Thompson, Walter R. March 22 1850 - living in 1893
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Ann Anderson alabammygrammy@aol.com May 23, 2004, 5:37 am

Author: Brant & Fuller (1893)
    WALTER R. THOMPSON, M. D.-Dr. Thompson is a native of Copiah county, Miss.,
and son of Jesse and Nancy (Rembert) Thompson. His grandfather, Jesse Thompson,
Sr., was born in Ireland, and came to the United States when a boy, settling
with his parents in the state of Georgia. The wife of Jesse Thompson, Sr., was a
Harvey, a family from which the distinguished supreme court judge, L. Q. C.
Lamar, of Georgia, is descended, and through the Thompson branch, the
relationship included the late Hon. Jacob Thompson, secretary of state under
Jefferson Davis during the continuance of the southern Confederacy. Jesse
Thompson, father of the doctor, was born in Hancock county, Ga., July 1, 1812,
and is now an extensive planter in Mississippi, owning about 2,000 acres of land
in Copiah county, that state, where he resides. He is influential in the
political affairs of his state, served the Confederacy as a gallant soldier in
the late Civil war, and has now reached the ripe old age of eighty years, in
full possession of nearly all his faculties, physical and mental. He married, in
1835. Nancy Rembert, daughter of John Rembert, a native of Louisiana, and
descendant of an old French Huguenot family, and reared eight children, namely:
John W., graduate of both literary and law departments of Mississippi
university, a gallant soldier in the late war, lieutenant of a company in
Twelfth Mississippi cavalry, died full of promise in the latter part of 1861;
Sarah, wife of Capt. Webb, of Hazelhurst, Miss.; Jesse, Jr., planter in
Mississippi; William H.., killed in battle at Jackson, La., July, 1863; Eudora,
wife of W. D. Weems; Walter R.; Alice, wife of L. L. Fatherree, of Hazelhurst,
Miss., and Cora, wife of S. F. Granberry, also of Mississippi, living at the
town of Beauregard. Dr. Thompson was born March 22, 1850, and entered school at
the early age of five. After a three years' preparatory course in the
Summerville institute, near Macon, Miss., under the tutorship of the noted
educator, Prof. L. S. Gehtright, he entered, at the age of nineteen, the
Mississippi university, Oxford, where he pursued his studies till 1871,
graduating that year with the degree of A. M. His collegiate course being
finished, the doctor entered the teachers' profession, being first employed as
principal of the schools of Hazelhurst, which position he held to the eminent
satisfaction of the patrons for a period of eight years. For the succeeding two
years he was principal of the Wesson schools, thence went to Birmingham, Ala.,
where for two years he carried on the mercantile business, but that calling not
being to his taste, he abandonded it and again entered the educational field at
Midway, Ala., where he taught one year. About this time the citizens of Brewton
inaugurated a movement for the establishment in that city of an educational
institution of high rank, which eventually culminated in the Brewton institute,
of which Prof. Thompson was elected principal in 1885. Entering upon the
discharge of his duties, the newly elected principal was not long in bringing
the school up to a high plane of efficiency and under his successful management
it became, within a comparatively brief period, one of the leading educational
institutions in the southern part of the state. He remained at the head of this
school about three years, and then resigned for the purpose of gratifying a long
felt desire of entering the medical profession, the study of which he had
pursued at intervals during his entire educational experience. In the winter of
1889 he attended a course of lectures in the Alabama Medical college, at Mobile,
and the succeeding year he took a course at the Medical college of Louisville,
Ky., from which he graduated in the spring of 1891. Since the latter year, he
has been actively engaged in the practice of his profession at Brewton, where he
has already won a prominent place among his professional brethren. The doctor
was married in 1872, in Copiah county, Miss., to Ellen Hargrave, whose
unfortunate death occurred after a brief wedded life of two years. The doctor
married his present wife, Mary E. Coleman, at Midway, Ala., in 1876, a union
blessed with the birth of two children: Jesse and Ina. Politically the doctor
affiliates with the democratic party, and fraternally is connected with the
Knights of Honor. He and wife are members of the Methodist church.



Additional Comments:
from "Memorial Record of Alabama", Vol. I, p. 1006-1008
Published by
Brant & Fuller (1893)
Madison, WI

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