November 16, 1867

William Fosgate Kirby, who became an associate justice on the Arkansas Supreme Court and also served as state attorney general and U.S. senator, was born near Texarkana (Miller County) to a farm family who had moved from Alabama. He was a friend and political ally of Jeff Davis, who was an ardent agrarian, and he was a spirited opponent to President Woodrow Wilson’s efforts to involve the United States in World War I. In 1903, he was commissioned by the General Assembly to produce an authoritative compilation of Arkansas’s statutes, resulting in the 1904 publication of Kirby’s Digest of the Statutes of Arkansas.