October 19, 1898

William Fosgate Kirby from Texarkana (Miller County)—who had recently graduated with a bachelor’s degree in law from Cumberland University in Lebanon, Tennessee, in the same class as his father—married Ella Kelly of Texarkana. Kirby established a law practice and later became an associate justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court. He also served as state attorney general and a U.S. senator. In 1903, he was commissioned by the General Assembly to produce an authoritative compilation of Arkansas’s statutes, which was published the following year as Kirby’s Digest of the Statutes of Arkansas.