Stone Gardens: Missouri-born soldier, lawyer and politician help modernize life in rural Boone County in the early 1800's
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John Wesley Andrews was born May 30, 1843, in Bates County, Missouri, the son of William Andrews, a native of Tennessee, and Mary Gadden, who had been born in Missouri.
The family later settled in northern Arkansas in the Crooked Creek country that would become part of Boone County after the war, an area of farms, timber, and emerging towns along the routes connecting the Ozarks to the broader South.
As a young man Andrews enlisted in the Confederate army and served in the Twenty-Seventh Arkansas Infantry. The regiment was organized in the summer of 1862 at Yellville from companies raised mainly in Carroll, Marion, Izard, Fulton, and Searcy counties.
It was assigned to Shaver’s Brigade in the Trans-Mississippi Department, took part in the Prairie Grove campaign and the defense of Little Rock, and later fought in the Red River campaign, including the Battle of Jenkins’ Ferry.
Like many Arkansas units, the Twenty-Seventh was often short of arms and supplies; it ended the war at Marshall, Texas, when the department surrendered in May 1865.
After the war Andrews returned to the Harrison area and took up the practice of law.
In an era when formal legal education was still uncommon in the mountain counties, he built a reputation as a capable attorney through study, court work, and the practical demands of a frontier bar. He married Louisiana A. Beller, who had been born July 10, 1842, in Carroll County. the daughter of William Campbell Beller and Martha Lovina Wilburn.
Louisiana had earlier married James R. Deshazo of Tennessee; their daughter Alabama was a small child when the 1860 census recorded the household on Crooked Creek. The marriage to Andrews produced several children, among them Mary Lorina (Mollie), Emily Victoria, and others who died in infancy or childhood: Sarah M., Margret E., Vallora A., and Iva Norah. Mollie later married into the Jernigan family; Victoria married into the Clendenin family. The losses of the younger children were common in the period but left their mark on the household.
Andrews’s public career centered on the law and county government. He practiced in Harrison and, from 1898 to 1902, served as Boone County Judge. In Arkansas the office combined executive and limited judicial duties: the county judge managed county roads and property, oversaw expenditures, and sat as the county court on matters involving taxes, paupers, and local administration.
His term placed him at the center of Boone County’s affairs at the turn of the century, when the railroad had already transformed Harrison from a small settlement into a growing commercial center.
Louisiana Andrews died January 7, 1911, at the age of sixty-eight and was buried in Rose Hill Cemetery in Harrison. John Wesley Andrews survived her by more than a decade.
By the time of his death, he was listed as a widower and a lawyer.
He died in Harrison on February 16, 1923, at the age of seventy-nine years, three months, and ten days. The attending physician, Dr. C. M. Routh, recorded the cause as heart trouble. Mrs. Ira Beach of Harrison served as informant on the certificate.
Andrews was buried two days later in Rose Hill Cemetery, Block 6, Lot 4, Space 10, beside his wife.
His life spanned the frontier settlement of the Ozarks, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the modernization of northern Arkansas.
The death certificate, the Find a Grave memorial noting his service as county judge and Confederate soldier, the roster of the Twenty-Seventh Arkansas Infantry, and the scattered family records of the Beller and Andrews households together preserve the outline of a man who practiced law, held local office, raised a family through repeated losses, and remained in Harrison until the end.
