By Bob Kriebel, For the Journal and Courier

The action memorializes Allison Ellsworth Stuart (1886-1950) and former Gov. Roger D. Branigin (1902-1975). Both played vital roles in the law firm's longevity and success. Both also were distinguished sons of Tippecanoe and Johnson counties, respectively.

Roger Branigin

Many still living knew Branigin, a native of Johnson County and a graduate of Franklin College and Harvard University. His parents were Elba and Zula Branigin, the father a distinguished Franklin (Ind.) lawyer of Irish descent.

Roger Branigin had been a Johnson County deputy prosecutor, and had served in the legal department of the Federal Land Bank in Louisville, Ky., where he rapidly advanced to the position of general counsel.

He had joined the Stuart firm in the late 1930s. During World War II, he headed the legal division of the Army's Transportation Corps and attained the rank of lieutenant colonel.

Back in postwar Lafayette he was an effective corporate lawyer, a popular and witty after-dinner speaker and toastmaster. He served a term as president of the Indiana Bar Association. He was a trustee both of Purdue and Franklin College, was a director of Lafayette Life Insurance Co., and was one of the early stockholders in, and counsel for, National Homes Corp. founded in Lafayette in 1940.

A Democrat, Branigin failed in a bid for nomination for governor in 1956, but won by 263,000 votes in 1964.

Branigin later said from time to time that one of the fondest memories of his four years as governor, ending in January 1969, was launching the Hoosier Scholarship Program to help needy and deserving young men and women attend college. He often spoke of a Fort Wayne dairy truck driver whose four children, all high school valedictorians, attended Indiana colleges on the Hoosier Scholarships he boosted so strongly.

"They would never have had a chance in the world to go to college," Branigin said. "That's the most inspiring thing I remember about being governor. After all, kids are the jewels of our society."

Allison Stuart

Fewer living people, however, will recall much about the Lafayette native Allison Stuart, who graduated cum laude from Princeton in 1908 and completed his legal education at Northwestern and in the law office where he practiced after admittance to the bar in 1910. The large and prestigious law firm known since 1878 by a variety of combinations of its partners' names -- Stuart, Devol, Branigin, Ricks & Schilling to cite one example -- today is known simply as Stuart & Branigin.

Allison Stuart, appointed as a Purdue trustee in 1940, was a nephew of Charles B. Stuart and William V. Stuart, both of whom had served as Purdue board presidents. A fourth member of the firm, Judge Edwin P. Hammond, had been a Purdue trustee during 1889-1890. Charles B. Stuart sat on the board from 1885-1899; William V. Stuart served three times between 1899 and 1921.

Allison Stuart was a member of the scholastic honorary fraternity Phi Beta Kappa and of Phi Delta Phi legal fraternity. He served as Purdue University counsel from about 1925 to 1940.

He was married June 9, 1910 to Annie Louise Cole of Lafayette. His hobby was farming and livestock production. He owned a farm near Lafayette where he raised Hereford cattle; was a director and vice president of the American Hereford Cattle Breeders Association. And for a while, he managed Shadeland Farm southeast of Lafayette in Union Township, long known as one of the nation's best beef cattle breeding establishments.

Allison Stuart headed the committee that chose and hired Dr. Frederick L. Hovde as Purdue president effective in early 1946. Stuart's 1950 death resulted from complications after surgery. His demise moved Hovde to comment:

"Our state has lost one of its most outstanding citizens, Purdue University one of its most faithful servants, and the legal profession one of its most able members.

"He was a man with wonderful qualities, clear vision, kindly yet forceful character, a wise man with the ability to see through a problem and the courage to meet it, as it needed to be met. His quiet, unassuming way endeared him to all of us who knew him."

Back in 1836 Allison Stuart's grandfather, Judge William Z. Stuart, located at Logansport where he began law practice and in 1851 became a justice of the Indiana Supreme Court. One of his sons, Thomas Arthur Stuart, came to Lafayette in 1876 and began law practice as a junior member of the firm of Coffroth and Stuart. Later he became associated with his brothers. Charles B. and William V. Stuart under the firm name of Stuart Brothers.