History of Oakland County Michigan a narrative account of its historic progress, its people, its principal interests / compiled from the official records of the county, the newspapers and data of personal interviews, under the editorial supervision of Thaddeus D. Seeley.

HISTORY OF OAKLAND COUNTY

179

the War of the Rebellion, with the rank of captain. Mr. Woodman took
a great deal of pride in referring to that fact and the fact that he was a
soldier in the Mexican war; that his father was a soldier in the War of
1812 and that his grandfather was a soldier in the Revolutionary war.
Mr. Bateman thought Mr. Woodman made an undue use of these facts
in his arguments to juries and slightingly referred to the harness-maker,
Mr. Bateman, who presumed to know something about the honorable
profession of the law.
"After reading Blackstone as stated, and attending Hillsdale College
a few terms, and teaching school three winters, I became deputy county
clerk of Lapeer county and, as such, attended the sessions of court, making up the court journals, reading law as I could and familiarizing myself with the pleadings which were filed and the court entries which were
made. After a year or six months, as it then was in the law department
of Michigan, I applied for admission to practice in the court over which
Hon. Joseph Turner presided. Hon. William T. Mitchell of Port Huron,
then in attendance upon court in Lapeer, was chairman of the committee
who conducted the examinations and, much to my gratification, in October, I869, I was admitted to practice. When I contrast my preparation,
or lack of preparation rather, for the practice of law, with the very rigid
and searching examination to which the applicants are subjected by the
State Board of Law Examiners, and the three years' course of nine
months each now required by the law schools before a student can secure his diploma, I am reminded that an evolution has been going on in
the law quite as marked as that in other callings.
"At the time I applied for admission to the bar, Robert J. Taylor, a
graduate of the literary department of the University of Michigan, was
also admitted to practice. He was afterward elected prosecuting attorney
and state senator, each of which offices he held for two terms, the duties
of which he discharged with marked ability. He was a man of some
means and preferred the peaceful avocation of growing fruits and the
work of an apiarist to the contentions of the court-room, and for some
years has not been in the active practice of his profession.
"The practicing lawyers at that time in Lapeer county were Mr.
Andrus, Egbert W. Cook; Hon. William Hemingway, who had been a
member of the Michigan legislature; Hon. Silas B. Gaskill, who was
later circuit judge; Hon. William W. Stickney, who succeeded Judge
Gaskill upon the circuit bench; Phineas White, Hon. Jonathan R. White
Harrison Geer, who was the junior member of the firm of Gaskill &
Geer and whom you all know as the very successful and able trial lawyer
now living in Detroit; Calvin Thomas; Stephen Thomas, the father of
Calvin, now an honored professor in Columbia University; and John M.
Wattles, who later established the bank still doing business as John M.
Wattles & Company. These men have all gone into the life beyond, except Mr. Geer and Judge Stickney. Most of them were men of ability
and character and did much to so shape events in that country as to
make it one of the most intelligent and law-abiding in the state.
"It is a singular and to me a gratifying circumstance that the chairman of the examining committee before whom Senator Taylor and myself appeared, the genial and learned Judge Mitchell of Port Huron,
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