Henry L. Bridges

Henry Lee Bridges, Sr. (December 6, 1874 – April 9, 1939), was a businessman who served from 1928 to 1932 and again from 1934 to 1936 as the mayor of the small city of Minden, the seat of government of Webster Parish, in northwestern Louisiana.^[1]

Biography

Bridges was born in nearby rural Athens in Claiborne Parish but moved to Minden in 1907, where he operated a clothing store. He was first elected mayor in the Democratic primary in the spring of 1928, when Robert F. Kennon, then twenty-six and later the governor of Louisiana from 1952 to 1956, declined to seek a second two-year term.^[2] The position became four years in 1954 and is now filled in the fall of non-presidential years.

Bridges was reelected on April 8, 1930, when he defeated Coleman Lindsey, later a state senator and the lieutenant governor in the abbreviated 1939–1940 term of Governor Earl Kemp Long.^[3] In that contest, Bridges polled 519 votes to 402 for Lindsey.^[4] In 1932, however, Bridges was unseated by his sole opponent, former Mayor Connell Fort, who had preceded Kennon as mayor from 1922 to 1926. Fort polled 709 votes to Bridges's 437 in the primary held on April 12, 1932.^[5]

In the primary election held on April 10, 1934, Fort was eliminated from the race,^[6] and Bridges then faced his eventual successor as mayor, David William Thomas, a former university professor, journalist, publisher, and lawyer, who was a native of Wales. In the runoff election held on May 15, Bridges handily defeated Thomas, 624 to 377.^[7] In March 1936, Thomas in turn unseated Bridges, 736 to 682, to secure the first of his two consecutive terms in the office.^[8]After his defeat, Bridges returned to store keeping with the opening of a men's furnishings business in the Webb Building in Minden.^[9]

Bridges was married to the former Miss Forrest Cobb (November 14, 1880 – December 18, 1947) of Athens. The couple had two daughters, Mrs. Helen Moss of Erath in Vermilion Parish, later Helen Gallien of Columbus, Mississippi, and Mary Elise Bridges, a former Webster Parish schoolteacher then living in Baton Rouge. Later, she was Mary Hilzim (1908–1988) of Minden, the wife of R. H. "Buster" Hilzim (1883–1961). Henry and Forrest Bridges had four sons, Henry L. Bridges, Jr. (1903–1962), who died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-nine;^[10] Forrest Lee Bridges (1912–1973), who ran for ward marshal in 1948,^[11] and Jack Clifford Bridges (1917–1977), all of Minden, and Lewell Bridges (1910–1980) of Shreveport.^[2][12][13]

Bridges's grave marker at Minden Cemetery

Like his oldest son, Bridges died of a heart attack while he was returning home from observing a golf game. He was sixty-five and a Methodist. Pastors of Methodist, Presbyterian, and Baptist churches conducted his services. He is interred beside family members at Minden Cemetery.^[2]

Son Lee Bridges was an inspector for the City of Minden and a former municipal sanitation superintendent. He died at the age of sixty in a boating accident in 1973 on Toledo Bend Reservoir near Many, Louisiana, in the company of his friend Albert Simolke (1917–1976) of Minden. Lee Bridges and his wife, the former Roba Watson (1917–2010), had two children, Roba Leah Bridges Miller (born 1949), and her husband, Clif Miller, then of Monroe, and later from Shreveport, and Henry Watson Bridges (born 1950), subsequently a banker in Minden.^[14]

References