Joshua Lewis (judge)

Joshua Lewis (1772–1833) was a judge of the Superior Court of the Territory of Orleans and, after Louisiana became a state, the 1st Judicial District Court of that state.

Joshua Lewis was born in Leesburg, Virginia, in Loudoun County, October 25, 1772, to Captain John Lewis and his wife Elizabeth (maiden name?). John and Elizabeth Lewis had two other sons, William (born 1767) and Thomas (born 1774). Sometime in the 1780s, Joshua moved with his family to Jessamine County, Kentucky, where his father built a mill on the Kentucky River near what is now known as High Bridge. In 1790, Captain Lewis donated 100 acres of land to the Bethel Academy for Bishop Asbury to form a Methodist Episcopal School. Later, Joshua attended Cokesbury College, also established by Bishop Asbury in Abdington, Maryland. Joshua graduated in 1793 and the diploma resides at the Louisiana State Museum among the relics of Mrs. H.H. Bull.

Joshua married America Lawson, daughter of General Robert Lawson, on December 23, 1797. They had twelve children, 10 of whom lived past the age of 3: Sidonia Pierce (1798), John Lawson (1800), Louisa Marie (1801), Theodore (1803), Eliza (1804), Alfred Jefferson (1808), Twins Hampden and Sidney (1810), George Washington (1814), and Benjamin Franklin (1818).

John Lawson Lewis became both Mayor and Sheriff of New Orleans and as a teen ran messages for General Jackson during the Battle of New Orleans, later fighting in the Civil War as a Brigadier General of the Louisiana State Militia. Algernon Sidney became a lawyer and was father of Ernest Sidney Lewis, famous gynecologist); Theodore, a major in the Mexican American War and a Confederate veteran, Alfred Jefferson (lawyer and judge), and George Washington (planter in Algiers).

Lewis graduated from Washington and Lee University, having studied law, and settled his family in Jessamine County, Kentucky, near Lexington, in 1798. He was appointed the prosecutor for Jessamine County that year and was elected to the Kentucky House of Representatives in 1799, 1803 and 1804.

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