WALKER, RICHARD SHECKLE (1824-1901). Richard S. Walker, lawyer and judge, was born in Barren County, Kentucky, in 1824. He graduated from Centenary College in Jackson, Louisiana, in 1842 and received his law degree from Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1844. He traveled to Texas in February 1846 and established his practice in San Augustine, Texas. On July 1, 1848, he married Eliza Jane Clark, daughter of Judge Amos Clark of Nacogdoches, and in the fall of that year he moved to Nacogdoches, where he formed a partnership with his father-in-law. Walker was appointed district attorney of Nacogdoches County in 1847 and held that position for eight years. He became a member of the Milam Lodge on June 23, 1851. In 1857 he became the partner of Judge George F. Moore, chief justice of the Supreme Court of Texas. Walker reported the decisions of the court for the twenty-second, twenty-third, and twenty-fourth Texas Reports and did the twenty-fifth report alone. He was a member of the Constitutional Convention of 1866 and an alternate delegate to the national Democratic convention of 1868. Walker was appointed by Governor Richard Coke to fill an unexpired term as district judge in 1873; he was subsequently elected in 1876. He was appointed by Coke and served on the Commission of Appeals from 1879 until he resigned because of illness in 1890. He died in Cincinnati in 1901, where he had gone due to his failing health. He was survived by two sons and a daughter.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Carolyn Reeves Ericson, Nacogdoches, Gateway to Texas: A Biographical Directory (2 vols., Fort Worth: Arrow-Curtis Printing, 1974, 1987). History of Texas, Together with a Biographical History of Milam, Williamson, Bastrop, Travis, Lee and Burleson Counties (Chicago: Lewis, 1893). James D. Lynch, The Bench and Bar of Texas (St. Louis, 1885).
