BLISS, DON ALFONSO (1854-1939). Don Alfonso Bliss, lawyer, judge, and legal scholar, son of Joseph F. Bliss, was born in Artesia, Mississippi, on December 14, 1854. He graduated from King's College, Bristol, Tennessee, in 1873. On April 22, 1874, he married Myra Maud Hampton; they had six children. The family moved to Texas, where Bliss conducted the Van Alstyne Institute from 1881 to 1885, then entered the law school of the University of Texas. He was admitted to the bar in 1886 and practiced in Sherman until 1892, when he was appointed judge of the Fifteenth Judicial District. In 1906, at the insistence of Jot Gunter,^qv with whom he had practiced in Sherman, he moved to San Antonio, where he served on the board of education. As an authority on land-title cases, he wrote on the establishment of Texas law in regard to public charities and represented Adina de Zavala^qv in the case to save the Alamo in 1907. He also published a legal work, The Nature of the Title Held by the Heirs of a Deceased Wife to One-half of the Ganancial Property under the Spanish Law (n.d.). When irrigation^qv projects opened the Rio Grande valley for citrus-fruit growing and truck farming, Judge Bliss represented several purchasers and became an authority on irrigation law. He practiced in San Antonio until shortly before his death there, on December 3, 1939.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Emory A. Bailey, Who's Who in Texas (Dallas: John B. McCraw Press, 1931). Frank W. Johnson, A History of Texas and Texans (5 vols., ed. E. C. Barker and E. W. Winkler [Chicago and New York: American Historical Society, 1914; rpt. 1916]). Vertical Files, Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas at Austin.