The Handbook of Texas is free-to-use thanks to the support of readers like you. Support the Handbook today.

Font size: A / A reset

Tod, John Grant, Jr. (1864–1918)

Rosa Tod Hamner Biography

John Grant Tod, Jr., attorney, judge, and Texas secretary of state, son of Abigail Fisher (West) and John Grant Tod, Sr., was born in Richmond, Fort Bend County, on January 14, 1864. In 1866 his family moved to nearby Harrisburg, where he resided the rest of his life. He received an LL.B. degree from Yale in 1885 and practiced law in Houston. He served as county judge of Harris County, 1892–96, and district judge, 1896–1900. He was secretary of state during the second term of the administration of Governor Joseph Draper Sayers. He was also a member of the State Board of Education. He took an active part in the development of the Houston Ship Channel, including the extension of the channel through Irish Bend (later the Deer Park area) in 1905. In 1890 he was married to Osceola Morriss, and the couple had two daughters. Tod died in Galveston on February 20, 1918, and was buried in Glendale Cemetery, Harrisburg. See also TODVILLE, TEXAS.

John Leslie Dickson, The Houston Ship Channel (M.A. thesis, George Peabody College for Teachers, 1929). Niel John McArthur, The Twenty-Seventh Legislature and State Administration of Texas (Austin: Ben C. Jones, 1901). Proceedings of the Texas Bar Association, 1919. C. W. Raines, Year Book for Texas (2 vols., Austin: Gammel-Statesman, 1902, 1903). Marilyn M. Sibley, The Port of Houston (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968). WPA Writers Program, Houston (Houston: Anson Jones, 1942).

Categories:

Law, Law Enforcement, and Outlaws
Politics and Government
Judges

Time Periods:

Late Nineteenth-Century Texas
Progressive Era

Places:

Houston

The following, adapted from the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, is the preferred citation for this entry.

Rosa Tod Hamner, “Tod, John Grant, Jr.,” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed September 28, 2020, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/tod-john-grant-jr.

Published by the Texas State Historical Association.

All copyrighted materials included within the Handbook of Texas Online are in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107 related to Copyright and “Fair Use” for Non-Profit educational institutions, which permits the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA), to utilize copyrighted materials to further scholarship, education, and inform the public. The TSHA makes every effort to conform to the principles of fair use and to comply with copyright law.

For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml

If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

This entry belongs to the following Handbook Special Projects:

Load a Random Entry Report an Error Request a Revision

Become a TSHA member and get a FREE Texas Almanac!

Loading