Edward A. Thomas (April 27, 1838 – September 2, 1890) was an American jurist who served as a justice of the Territorial

Wyoming Supreme Court The Wyoming Supreme Court is the highest court in the U.S. state of Wyoming. The Court consists of a Chief Justice and four Associate Justices. Each Justice is appointed by the Governor of Wyoming from a list of three nominees submitted by the ...

from March 20, 1873, to December 14, 1877. Born in

Cayuga County, New York Cayuga County is a county in the U.S. state of New York. As of the 2020 census, the population was 76,248. Its county seat and largest city is Auburn. The county was named for the Cayuga people, one of the Native American tribes in the I ...

,Wyoming State Archives biography of E.A. Thomas, available at 2301 Central Ave, Cheyenne, WY 82001. Thomas was captain in the Union Army in the

American Civil War The American Civil War (April 12, 1861May 26, 1865; also known by Names of the American Civil War, other names) was a civil war in the United States between the Union (American Civil War), Union ("the North") and the Confederate States of A ...

,Rebecca W. Thomson, ''Annals of Wyoming'' (1981), p. 88. and was a lawyer, and later mayor in

Auburn, New York Auburn is a city in Cayuga County, New York, United States. Located at the north end of Owasco Lake, one of the Finger Lakes in Central New York, the city had a population of 26,866 at the 2020 census. It is the largest city of Cayuga County, the ...

. On March 20, 1873, President

Ulysses S. Grant Ulysses S. Grant (born Hiram Ulysses Grant; April 27, 1822July 23, 1885) was the 18th president of the United States, serving from 1869 to 1877. In 1865, as Commanding General of the United States Army, commanding general, Grant led the Uni ...

appointed Thomas, then 35 years old, to the Territorial Wyoming Supreme Court, to replace John W. Kingman. During his four years of service there, Thomas "was the compiler for the first volume of the Wyoming Supreme Court decisions". He resigned from the court on December 14, 1877, and "returned East, where he devoted some of his time to writing", which included the authorship of several novels and a dictionary of biography. Thomas died in

Norristown, Pennsylvania Norristown is a Borough (Pennsylvania), borough with Home Rule Municipality (Pennsylvania), home rule status and the county seat of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, United States, in the Delaware Valley, Philadelphia metropolitan area. Located ...

References

1838 births 1890 deaths People from Cayuga County, New York Union army officers Justices of the Wyoming Supreme Court 19th-century American judges {{Wyoming-state-judge-stub