Born: Sunday, January 16th, 1859
Died: Sunday, September 4th, 1921
Birthplace: Oregon City, Oregon
Religion: Presbyterian
Education: University of Oregon, B.S. (1883)
Career: Sprague City Council (1887)
Prosecuting Attorney (1888)
Superior Court (1889-1896)
State House of Representatives (1898-1900)
Served: Monday, January 14th, 1901 to Sunday, September 4th, 1921
Chief Justice: Monday, January 9th, 1905 to Monday, January 14th, 1907;
Friday, September 27th, 1912 to Monday, January 13th, 1913
Political Party: Republican
Wallace Mount was the oldest of fourteen children of Henry D. and Rebecca (Stevens) Mount. His father braved the dangers of a plains crossing to the far west at age eighteen and settled in the Willamette Valley near Oregon City. Judge Mount was born and grew up on his parents’ farm, attended public schools in Silverton, Oregon, and graduated from the University of Oregon in 1883. After graduation he read law in the offices of George Williams, H. Y. Thompson, and George H. Durham of Portland, and gained admittance to the Oregon bar in 1885.The future jurist practiced law in Portland for one year, then moved to Sprague, Washington Territory, to open a law office. He soon became prominent in Republican politics, being elected as a Sprague city councilman in 1887, prosecuting attorney for the Third Judicial District including Lincoln, Adams, and Douglas counties in 1888 and, upon statehood in 1889, superior court judge for Lincoln, Adams, Douglas, and Okanogan counties. He won again in 1892, but suffered defeat in his bid for a third superior court term in the Populist landslide of 1896.
Mount moved to Spokane to form the law partnership of Mount and Merritt. Turning his attention to the state legislature in 1898 he won election to the lower house from Spokane County. In the 1899 legislative session he chaired the house Committee on Counties and Boundaries and served on the Judiciary Committee. In 1900 Mount ran as a Republican for the supreme court and led the judicial ballot, defeating his nearest Democratic rival by more than 12,000 votes. Six years later he again led the judicial ticket, overwhelming the Democrats by nearly 40,000 votes. Reelected in two subsequent contests, he served a total of twenty years on the high court.
Judge Mount married Carrie Walker of Eugene, Oregon, in 1887. They became the parents of two sons, Frank and William. In 1896 Carrie passed away and three years later the judge married Ida (Hasler) Maloney, who had two daughters from a previous marriage, Hazel and Mira. The family attended the Presbyterian Church, and the judge was active in the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, Kiwanis, and Knights of Pythias.
Judge Mount gained recognition for his 1917 landmark decision that restricted certain forms of labor picketing. He gained a reputation for independence and courage from this and other decisions. During his last few months on the bench, failing health prevented the justice from carrying a full share of the court’s business. In September 1921, Judge Mount’s heart failed. He was sixty-two years old.
Stephen J. Chadwick eulogized the judge at the memorial services:
It was forty-three years ago that I first knew Wallace Mount. His outstanding characteristics were his great good nature, the evenness of his temper, his loveable qualities and his fairness in all his relations with others. He was a gentleman always and everywhere. He was possessed even in youth of those qualities that marked him and made him strong in his manhood …
His early public work was marked by an integrity of purpose which attracted the notice of those who knew the needs of the state, and he was called to the highest dignity that the state can offer, when he entered into a career that was to last for more than twenty years, and to be ended only by death …
He possessed a solid learning in the law. In him there was no flash of shallowness, or resort to words or phrases, to cover an uncertainty of mind. He was direct and forceful. Whether right or wrong as measured by the aggregate of opinion, he always believed himself to be right and was ever ready and able to defend his opinions against the ablest of his fellow judges.
He was strong in mind and strong in body. He met his duty, and accomplished the onerous demands of his office, with an ease and resolution that sometimes stirred the envy of those who finished the tasks assigned them by more laborious processes…
He believed inherently in law, in constituted authority; he believed that this was indeed a government of law and not of men; that the constitutions of our state and of our country were fixed anchors designed to withstand the storms of passion that must from time to time sweep the sea of public sentiment, and that they should not be dragged out of their fast moorings but sustained in reason until unrestrained emotion had wasted its energy and reason had again asserted its sway…
In all the years that it was my privilege to be associated with Judge Mount, I never heard him speak ill of any man.
Selected References
W. C. Wolfe, Sketches of Washingtonians (1906), p. 248; William Prosser, History of the Puget Sound Country, vol. 2 (1903), pp. 178-179; Julian Hawthorne, History of Washington, vol. 1 (1893), p. 666; Washington State Bar Association Proceedings (1921), pp. 177-180.
The preceding biography is from Charles Sheldon's The Washington High Bench: A Biographical History of the State Supreme Court, 1889-1991, © 1992 by the Board of Regents of Washington State University. Reprinted here with permission and licensed to the public under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by The Temple of Justice Project.
