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Collection:
Charles Dewey WILDES Papers
1900-1930
Wake County, N.C.
Physical Description: 28 items, including correspondence, notebooks, type¬
scripts, and printed matter
Acquisition: Gift of Marcus L. Scruggs, Raleigh, N.C., 1996
Description: This small collection is made up of what survives of the
private papers of Charles Dewey Wildes (1872-1952) , lawyer, son of Thomas
and Rachel M. (Dewey) Wildes, and grandson of the banker, Charles Dewey
(1798-1880). Wildes was born and educated in Raleigh. He read law under
Samuel Fox Mordecai (1852-1927.) , and was admitted to the bar in 1894. (The
collection includes an autographed copy of. the published condensation of
Mordecai' s 1900 lectures on "principal and agent" and "master and servant"
delivered to the Wake Forest College law class where Mordecai lectured
from 1900 to 1904.) Wildes' practice appears never to have been sufficiently
robust to compete successfully with other Raleigh lawyers, and he moved his
practice from Raleigh to Troy, N.C., about 1914 where he remained until 1924.
While in Troy, Wildes maintained a law notebook in which he made notes on
various subjects and annotations as to how they were affected by case law
through the year 1923 (mines and mining, timber rights, deeds, dower,
tenants in common, and so forth) . Returning to Raleigh, Wildes kept up
his law practice from 1925 to 1934, after which his name no longer appears
in the list of active Raleigh. lawyers. He was a justice of the peace and
a U.S. commissioner of affidavits from 1935 until the close of 1945 when he
was admitted as a patient to Dorothea Dix Hospital, where he died in 1952.
Wildes was Republican in his politics. In addition to the Republican
Congressional Committee's Republican Text-Book for the 1906 congressional
campaign, and the Republican National Committee's Campaign Text -Book for the
presidential election of 1916, his papers include a manuscript notebook
recording party structure in Wake County in 1930. The notebook reports the
membership of the county executive committee and the various precinct organiza¬
tions.