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Edwin Clay Roach

 

EDWIN CLAY ROACH is the dean of the bar of Lyon County. He has practiced law at Rock Rapids for over forty-five years, and his work as a lawyer has been accompanied by a varied service of a public nature and a constant participation in the work of the community.

Mr. Roach was born in Knox County, Illinois, December 31, 1850, son of James P. and Jane (Castle) Roach. His father was a captain in the Twenty-third Iowa Regiment in the Civil war. Edwin Clay Roach attended school at Oskaloosa, receiving part of his education in Oskaloosa College, now a part of Drake University, and in 1875 was graduated from the law department of the University
of Iowa. During the following seven years he practiced in Jasper County and in 1882 moved to Rock Rapids, which was then a small town in a comparatively sparsely populated section of the state. Mr. Roach has practiced law ever since coming to Rock Rapids.

He was elected and served as a member of the Twenty-first and Twenty-second General Assemblies in 1886-88 and was a delegate to the National Republican convention at Saint Louis in 1896. He is affiliated with Lodge No. 406, A. F. and A. M., is a Knight Templar Mason and Shriner and attends the Congregational Church.

He married, December 31, 1875, Miss Mary A. Ramsey, of Jasper County, Iowa, daughter of John and Catherine (Humphrey) Ramsey. They have four children: Loran J., born in March, 1878, served in the Fifty-first Iowa Regiment during the Spanish-American war and in the Philippine Island, being discharged in 1900. He graduated from the Iowa State University and took his law course at
Columbia University, New York, and is now in the employ of the Oklahoma Gas & Electric Company at Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. He married Georgine Reed, of Texarkana, Texas, and they have three children: Edwin R., George L. and Lillian. Lena, born in 1880, is a teacher at Rock Rapids. Rollin E., born in 1885, died in 1911. Paul R., born March 1, 1893, graduated from the University of Wisconsin, at Madison, and served in the World war, in Battery E. One Hundred and Tenth Field Artillery, and later in the Aviation Service and is now in the life insurance business at Rock Rapids. He married in 1921 Miss Doris Kline, of Saint Paul, and they have two boys, James and Frederick.

~ source: A Narrative History of The People of Iowa, Edgar Rubey Harlan, LL. B., A. M., Chicago and New York, 1931

~ transcribed and contributed by:  Debbie  Clough Gerischer, Iowa History Project