Morris Lyon Buchwalter (September 8, 1846 – March 12, 1924) was a radical Ohio Republican jurist of the post-Civil War era whose jurisprudence set a progressive standard following the failure of Reconstruction and during the rise in management/labor tensions in the Gilded Age.
Early life
Hon. Morris Lyon Buchwalter was born on September 8, 1846, and raised on the Buchwalter farmstead in Hallsville, Ross County, Ohio. He was the son of Levi and Margeret (née Lyon) Buchwalter, and the younger brother of Capt. Luther Morris Buchwalter and Capt. Edward Lyon Buchwalter, both Union Army officers of the American Civil War. Captain Luther Morris Buchwalter, an officer with the Ohio Volunteers, fell at the moonlit Wauhatchie skirmish during the third battle of Chickamauga. Capt. Edward L. Buchwalter (1841–1933) was an officer of the Ohio Volunteer Infantry and the 53rd Mississippi Colored Volunteers. A veteran of the Gettysburg campaign, his brother Capt. Luther Morris Buchwalter was the impetus for the future Judge Buchwalter joining the Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity at Ohio Wesleyan University in 1864. Buchwalter received his early education in the district schools of Ross county, then became a student of the Ohio Wesleyan University at Delaware, Ohio, and later changed his allegiance to Cornell University at Ithaca, New York, from which he received the degree of A.B. in 1869, being a member of the first class graduated from that institution.
Education to the Bar
In 1869, Morris L. Buchwalter transferred to the new Cornell University, where he became a founder of the New York Alpha chapter of Phi Kappa Psi. He was also the second President of the Irving Literary Society and roommate on Ithaca's Court Street with future Ohio Senator, Joseph Benson Foraker, who served with Morris's brother in the Tennessee campaign, which took the latter's life. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa Society, through the Cornell chapter. Immediately after receiving his diploma, he moved to Cincinnati and entered the Cincinnati Law School, from which he graduated in 1870 with the degree of LL.B. He began general practice in the city and gained recognition as an energetic, reliable and progressive young lawyer who shirked no responsibility and spared no time or effort in sustaining any cause in which he was engaged. His lifelong support for higher education peaked when he served as trustee for the University of Cincinnati, an institution for which he served in the same manner as his friends John Andrew Rea (as regent for the University of Washington), and Joseph B. Foraker(as trustee of Cornell University). Morris was also the first President, Cornell Alumni Association and Class Secretary, Class of 1869, for many years.
The City of Cincinnati would eventually number Judge Buchwalter among its esteemed citizens, a man who possessed a high degree of confidence from the people of the city. As the years passed, he gained a prominent position at the bar. On November 4, 1881, he was appointed by Governor Charles Foster, judge of the common-pleas court of the first judicial district of Ohio to fill a vacancy caused by the election of Judge Nicholas Longworth to the Supreme Court of Ohio. He, having been regularly elected for the full term in that court and subsequently reelected for a second and third term, and having also been endorsed by the vote of the bar of Hamilton county during three judicial elections, his judicial service ended February, 1897. Judge Buchwalter was thought to be a highly impartial jurist, and his decisions ranked among the clearest expositions of law enunciated from the common pleas bench in the 19th century.
This section incorporates text from the entry "Morris Lyon Buchwalter" in Cincinnati, the Queen City, 1788-1912, Volume 4, (S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1912) a publication now in the public domain.