Lon Vest Stephens

Lon Vest Stephens

Lawrence "Lon" Vest Stephens (born December 1, 1858 in Boonville , Cooper County , Missouri , † January 10, 1923 ) was an American politician ( Democratic Party ) and from 1897 to 1901 the 29th governor of the state of Missouri.

Early years

Stephens attended the Cooper Institute , then the Kemper Family School, and finally Washington and Lee University , where he passed his law exam in 1877. Prior to his public service career, Stephens worked as an accountant and in the telegraph service.

Political career and further curriculum vitae

Around 1886, "the poor appearance of Lon Vest" first attracted attention when he took over the bankruptcy estate of a nationally operating bank in St. Louis. Even though the bank was bankrupt, Stephens managed to get every dollar that savers and punters invested in his account with as little as 3 cents off. He got rich with this “coup de finance”, and the journalle at the time suspected that he would move into the cabinet of Richard P. Bland alias “Silver Dick” as treasurer . Bland lost the presidential election.

Between 1890 and 1897, Stephens was State Treasurer of Missouri. On November 3, 1896 he was elected the new governor of his state, on January 11, 1897 he was introduced to his office. During his four-year term of office, the Spanish-American War fell , to which Missouri had to deploy soldiers. The Unity School of Christianity was founded in Kansas City . It was also around this time that the Missouri Historical Society was established and a state school for the mentally handicapped was opened.

In 1899, Stephens got into an argument with the governor of the neighboring state of Kansas, William E. Stanley . Stephens had given Stanley assurances that Frank Embree , a black man who had been accused of a violent crime, would be brought to trial in Missouri unscathed because such accused were threatened with the death of whites brought up by lynching on the way . Embree was lynched, whereupon Stanley stopped working with Stephens, who did not even apologize for the incident.

After the end of his tenure, Stephens withdrew from politics and devoted himself to his private interests. He died on January 10, 1923 and was buried in Walnut Grove Cemetery in Boonville. Lon Stephens was married to Margaret Nelson.

Web links

• Lon Stephens in the National Governors Association (English)

• Lon Vest Stephens in the database of Find a Grave (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Quotes are from The St. Louis Republic , Sept. 7, 1896, p. 9. The article describes him as diplomatically awkward, but his wife, “a Miss Nelson from Boonville, beautiful, honest, and pleasant, irons every mistake by Lon with an excess of ingenuity, as strange as that may sound. "