Edmond Favor Noel
| Edmond Favor Noel | |
|---|---|
 |
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| 37th Governor of Mississippi | |
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In office January 21, 1908 – January 16, 1912 |
|
| Lieutenant | Luther Manship |
| Preceded by | James K. Vardaman |
| Succeeded by | Earl L. Brewer |
| Member of the Mississippi Senate | |
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In office 1895 1899 1920 |
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| Member of the Mississippi House of Representatives | |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
March 4, 1856 near Lexington, Mississippi |
| Died | July 30, 1927 (aged 71) Lexington, Mississippi |
| Political party | Democratic |
| Spouse(s) | Loula Hoskins (m. 1890) Alice Tye Neilson (m. 1905) |
| Profession | Lawyer |
Edmond Favor Noel (March 4, 1856 – July 30, 1927) was an American attorney and politician who was the governor of Mississippi from 1908 to 1912. The son of a planter family, he became a member of the Democratic Party.
Noel was elected to the state house, as a district attorney, and to the state senate before winning election as governor. He achieved gains in education, child labor laws, and established a state charity hospital. After his tenure, he was re-elected to the state senate.
Edmond Favor Noel was born in 1856 on his family's cotton plantation in Holmes County, Mississippi near the city of Lexington, the third son of several children of Leland Noel. His father had become a successful cotton planter before the war. His mother was Margaret Ann Sanders, daughter of a Virginia planter. The earliest Noel ancestor in America immigrated to the Virginia Colony in the 1660s from the Netherlands, where his French Huguenot ancestor had migrated because of religious persecution in France. Edmond was named after his paternal uncle, Edmund Faver Noel, and in some records his name appears with the same spelling.
Leland Noel and his brother Edmund were sent to Mississippi in 1835 by their father as young unmarried men from their home plantation Paynefield in Essex County, Virginia, to develop a 1200-acre property he had bought in Franklin. The brothers later purchased their own plantation properties in Holmes County and married. Together with a younger third brother, William L. Noel, who joined them, the three became major slaveholders. According to the 1860 Slave Schedules of the US Census, the three held 130 slaves in total that year; Leland held the most. They cultivated extensive cotton plantations in Holmes County.
Edmond's father Leland lost great wealth after the Civil War. Rather than going to law school after college, Edmond Noel worked and 'read the law' with an established firm and passed the bar. He joined the Democratic Party.
When Noel entered politics, he was elected first to the Mississippi House of Representatives and later as a district attorney. In 1890 the Democratic-dominated legislature passed a new constitution with provisions that disenfranchised most African Americans, a status enforced through much of the 1960s. This also crippled the Republican Party in the state, whose members had been primarily African Americans.
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