William Alonzo Hyde

Hon. William Alonzo Hyde, probate judge of Bannock county, was born at Kaysville, Davis county, Utah, June 16, 1863, a son of Rosel and Mary Ann (Cowles) Hyde, representatives of old New England stock. They came west among the early pioneers and William A. Hyde was the youngest of a family of nine children. His ancestry in the paternal line can be traced back in Connecticut and Vermont to the year 1640 and the family history includes many notable names of patriots, physicians, literary men and pioneers.

William A. Hyde acquired a common school education, supplemented by six months study in the University of Utah, then known as the University of Deseret, or Deseret University. His youth to the age of twenty-one years was spent upon the home farm. When twenty-two years of age he was employed in a store at Layton, Utah, and was afterward postmaster there and a merchant of the town until 1894, when he removed to Downey, Idaho, where he built a store and developed a large mercantile enterprise under the name of the William A. Hyde Company.

In 1900 he removed to Pocatello, where he established a grocery store. Later he filled the office of deputy county auditor and recorder and subsequently was engaged in the real estate business. In 1916 he was elected to the office of probate Judge, was reelected in 1918. He had previously served as a member of the state legislature in 1898. He was reared in the faith of the democratic party but afterward espoused the republican cause, becoming associated with the Roosevelt wing of the party. However, his attitude is one of liberality upon political questions and he stands rather for the man than for the machine.

On the 16th of June, 1896, at Logan, Utah, Mr. Hyde was married to Maria Reddish, an English girl of good education who emigrated to this country with her father and mother, four brothers and two sisters in 1880. Judge and Mrs. Hyde have become parents of three children: Myrtle P., now the wife of C. W. Stoddard, Jr.; Elaine M., the wife of Willis S. Thomas; and Charles W.

Judge Hyde is president of the Pocatello stake of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which office he has held for twenty years. His position has placed him in the front ranks in the contest for the institution of reforms in the county and state. Bannock county, the stronghold of the liquor interests, was one of the first counties in the state to go dry, largely through the efforts of Judge Hyde.

The people of the county will long remember the little paper, The Searchlight, that was published in the interest of the reform elections and which was largely instrumental in downing the liquor interests of Bannock county and assisted materially in turning the state in the same direction. Judge Hyde has ever been an active man in service among the people, where his calling has led him, and has ever shunned the devious paths of the common politician. He is a man of artistic and literary temperament, contributing essays on religious and moral subjects to various periodicals and magazines.

SOURCE: http://www.archive.org/stream/historyofidahoge04hawlri/historyofida...