CLINE, HENRY B. (1828-ca.1900). Henry B. Cline, Houston attorney and school official, the son of Daniel Cline and a woman whose maiden name was Yeats, was born in Adams County, Pennsylvania, on September 19, 1828. He was raised a Lutheran and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with bachelor of laws and doctor of divinity degrees. He subsequently preached in various Protestant churches. He moved to New Orleans in the late 1840s and opened a boys' college that failed. He was admitted to the bar in New Orleans on November 9, 1853, and, according to one source, later edited the Louisiana Statutes. Cline moved to Texas in January 1861, married a teacher of the deaf and dumb at Woodville, and served for a time as justice of the peace in Tyler County. From 1867 until his death he lived in Houston, where he practiced law, mainly in abstracts and titles. Cline served as a member of the Constitutional Convention of 1875qv and in 1876 was on a committee to establish a public school system in Houston. Later he became supervisor and inspector of the Houston public schools. He was nominated for governor by the Lily-White Movementqv in 1896. After breaking his leg in a fall from a horse he died, at the age of seventy-two.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: H. L. Bentley and Thomas Pilgrim, Texas Legal Directory for 1876-77 (Austin: Democratic Statesman Office, 1877). Vertical Files, Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas at Austin.
Carolyn Hyman
