David Theophilus Stafford

David Theophilus Stafford (September 12, 1849 – January 18, 1926) was a planter, businessman, and sheriff of Rapides Parish in Central Louisiana, a position which he held from 1888 to 1904.

Biography

Stafford was born at Edgefield Plantation near Cheneyville, Louisiana, south of Alexandria in southern Rapides Parish, to Leroy Augustus Stafford and the former Sarah Catherine Wright, the daughter of Dr. Jesse D. Wright and the former Sarah R. Grimball. He was educated locally and then at the Louisiana Seminary of Learning, the forerunner to what became Louisiana State University. His father, a brigadier general in the Confederate Army, was mortally wounded in May 1864 in the Battle of the Wilderness in Virginia. Living in Alexandria, he established the firm Stafford and Cullen, a steamboat and warehouse concern. During Reconstruction, he emerged as a member of the white supremacist organization, the Knights of the White Camelia and as a Democrat opposed the Republican Party. He subsequently joined the Citizens League and was on Canal Street in New Orleans during unrest there on September 14, 1874.^[1]

On December 30, 1874, Stafford was married at the Tyrone Plantation to Amy Blanchard Graham (1853–1940), the daughter of George Mason Graham and the former Mary Eliza Wilkinson. The couple had eleven children^[2] and relocated in 1876 to the Montrose Plantation in Rapides Parish, at which he engaged in farming until his election as sheriff in 1888. After sixteen years as sheriff, he was appointed in 1904 by Governor Newton C. Blanchard as the Louisiana adjutant general. He was retained for a second term in that office in 1908 by Blanchard's successor, incoming Governor Jared Y. Sanders, Sr.^[1]

Stafford died at the age of seventy-six in Alexandria and is interred at Rapides Cemetery in Pineville, Louisiana.^[3]

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