Memorial Record of Western Kentucky, Volume I and Volume II, Lewis Publishing Company, 1904, pp. 11-13. McCracken Co. [Portrait,fronts piece]

COLONEL LORENZO D. HUSBANDS, one of the prominent citizens and leading representatives of the bar of Paducah, Kentucky, was born in Christian county, Kentucky, December 18, 1823, and is a son of Harmon Husbands and a grandson of Robert Husbands. Harmon Husbands was born in Rowan county, North Carolina, in August, 1776, and settled in Christian county, Kentucky, in 1805, becoming a pioneer farmer and
surveyor of that locality. In 1826 he removed to Caldwell county, Kentucky, and three years later to Crittenden county, and finally in 1834 to Ballard county, Kentucky, where he died in 1856, aged eighty years. The Husbands family is of English descent, two brothers, William and John, having, about 1700, emigrated from England to America. One possessed an aristocratic turn of mind and the other was of a plebeian character, and from the latter our subject's branch of the family descends. These brothers first settled in Pennsylvania and later in North Carolina at the forks of the Adkins [sic] River. A great-uncle of our subject later became a conspicuous character during the Revolutionary period and figured in the Mecklenburg revolution, and he and four others were sentenced to death, but he escaped to Western Pennsylvania; there fought in battles with the Indians and later
returned to North Carolina. Harmon Husbands married Sarah Renshaw, also a native of North Carolina, and a daughter of a farmer and pioneer of Port Royal, Tennessee, who died in the latter state. She lived to be eighty years old and bore her husband nine children, five daughters and four sons, all of whom are deceased except Mrs. Francis O. Lovelace, of Texas, and Colonel LORENZO D. Husbands.
Colonel Husbands was reared on the farm, and his education was limited to a few months spent each year in attendance on the local schools of his father's neighborhood, but as he has always been a student he has been able to supplement the meager education he then received, and is now a well-read and thoroughly informed man upon current events of a political, literary and scientific nature. He began reading law in 1847 with James B. Husbands, a brother, then
located in Paducah, and was admitted to the bar in 1849. Through his ability Mr. Husbands soon rose in his profession, and has long been a leader at the bar. In 1859 he was elected to the legislature, and while there cast his vote against "armed neutrality." Mr. Husbands took no active part in the Civil war, and bears his title of colonel
only as an endearing title bestowed upon him by his friends. His first political office was that of county attorney, to which he was elected in 1851, and served until 1855, when he was elected commonwealth attorney. After serving the legislature he never again sought office until 1897, when he was elected judge of the circuit court for the Second judicial district, and he is the present
incumbent of that office. Throughout his long and useful life he has been a Democrat. Judge Husbands was married first in 1851 to Hannah Singleton. She was born in Hines [sic] county, Mississippi, in 1834, and died in 1856,
leaving one son, Gip. In 1859 Judge Husbands married Mrs. Mary E. Bullock, nee Cook, a daughter of John W. Cook, of Christian county, Kentucky; her birth occurred in Princeton, Kentucky, and her education was principally obtained in Bethel Female College, Hopkinsville. Three children were born of this marriage, viz., Cook, Dow and Sallie, all of whom have been given excellent educational advantages.