Viewing "Bench and Bar of Clay County." (1918)
Clay County was established by the legislature on March 8, 1862. The county bar had eight members in 1883 and nineteen in 1917. Many lawyers who practiced in the county during these decades had active business interests in addition to their law practice. The lives of several judges profiled in this history of the county, published in 1918, warrant further study: the influential Ira B. Mills, who served as a district court judge from 1887 to 1893, when he was appointed to the Minnesota Railroad and Warehouse Commission, where he served until his death on May 3, 1921 (any study of railroad rate regulation during the Populist and Progressive Eras in this state must include an examination of the thinking of Mills); the independent-minded Wallace B. Douglas, who served as attorney general from 1899 to 1904, and associate justice of the state supreme court for nine months in 1904, when he failed reelection due to "an unfortunate dissension within the Republican party," and the patriotic Carroll A. Nye, who held numerous county offices, was elected district court judge in 1910, and in 1917, at the age of 53, enlisted in the army.