David Quin Eggleston (10 June 1857–17 October 1909), member of the Convention of 1901–1902, was born in Charlotte County and was the son of Lucy Nash Morton Eggleston and John William Eggleston, a merchant and longtime member of the county board of supervisors. Eggleston spelled his middle name as Quin throughout his life, but subsequent generations spelled it as Quinn. Nicknamed Daisy, he attended Hampden-Sydney College from 1873 to 1877 but did not receive a degree. He studied law at the University of Virginia for a year beginning in 1878 and was admitted to practice in the Charlotte County Court on 1 September 1879. Eggleston married Sue E. Daniel on 29 November 1883. Their two daughters and four sons included John William Eggleston, who served as chief justice of the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals.
Eggleston practiced law in Smithville (later Charlotte Court House) and late in the 1880s began to participate in Democratic Party politics. He also engaged in a variety of real estate and other business ventures, spending spent significant time away from his family in pursuit of economic success. By 1889 he was living in Florence, Alabama, a town on the Tennessee River, where he attempted to capitalize on its development boom. The following year Eggleston returned to Virginia and settled in the newly established town of Glasgow, in Rockbridge County. With a partner he founded Eggleston and Bouldin, a real estate and brokerage business, and purchased at least one hundred town lots for residential and commercial development. He was a vice president of the Virginia Real Estate Exchange in June 1891, but Glasgow's building boom soon collapsed. By January 1892 Eggleston had moved to Washington, D.C., to work as clerk for the House of Representatives' Committee on Expenditures in the United States Department of Agriculture.
Congress soon eliminated his position, but Eggleston continued to work in Washington and in New York. His family remained in Charlotte County, where he kept his hand in local politics by chairing the county's Democratic Party in 1892. He had returned to his legal practice by the spring of 1895 and the following year joined local Democrats in calling for a convention to revise the state's constitution. In August 1897 Eggleston narrowly defeated two opponents in the Democratic primary to become the party's candidate for the Senate of Virginia. Elected without opposition in November, he represented Charlotte and Mecklenburg Counties for a single term from 1897 to 1901. He sat on the Committees on Courts of Justice, on Finance and Banks, and on Public Institutions and Education.
Virginia voters approved calling a constitutional convention in a 1900 referendum. In April 1901 Charlotte County delegates nominated Eggleston by acclamation to be the county's candidate. He won election on 23 May with only one vote cast against him of the 722 total ballots. After the convention opened in Richmond on 12 June 1901, Eggleston was appointed to the temporary Committee on Privileges and Elections and to the standing Committees on the Preamble and Bill of Rights, on Judiciary, and on Public Institutions and Prisons. He introduced several resolutions, including one to abolish the county courts and city circuit courts. Eggleston often spoke against using the constitution to specify every detail of state government; he argued that the legislature, as an elective body, should determine such matters as judicial salaries and assessment of property taxes. He supported disfranchising those he considered "a menace to the welfare of this State" and voted with the majority on 4 April 1902 to enact suffrage restrictions that would limit the number of African American voters in Virginia. Eggleston argued that localities should be able to use local tax funds however they saw fit, not necessarily to fund primary schools for African Americans for a prescribed number of months each year. His amendment for virtually eliminating public funding for schools for black students was easily defeated. Eggleston voted on 29 May 1902 to proclaim the constitution in effect without approval by the voters, and a week later he joined the overwhelming majority in approving the new constitution, which disfranchised most African Americans and many poor whites.
On 9 December 1901 the General Assembly had elected Eggleston secretary of the commonwealth, an office responsible for keeping the governor's journal and state seals, compiling and issuing the annual public report, and certifying extraditions, pardons, and proclamations. As secretary, Eggleston was named as a defendant in an unsuccessful lawsuit the Negro Industrial Association of Virginia filed against the state in 1902 to contest the voting restrictions of the constitution enacted that year. The 1902 constitution made the office of secretary elective by the voters, and in 1905 Eggleston easily won the popular election. He was again the Democratic candidate for secretary in 1909 when he suddenly fell ill with pneumonia. David Quin Eggleston died at a Richmond hospital on 17 October 1909 and was buried in the family cemetery at Charlotte Court House.
Sources Consulted:
John Garland Pollard, comp., data for biographical sketches of members of the Virginia Convention of 1901–1902, compiled 1901, with self-reported birth date of 10 June 1857, Virginia Museum of History and Culture (VMHC), Richmond; Charlotte Co. Birth Register (variant birth date of 11 June 1857); full name in A Catalogue of the Officers and Students of the University of Virginia, Fifty-Fifth Session, 1878–9 (1879), 9, and Charles J. Seaman, ed., Catalogue of the Beta Theta Pi in the Forty-third year of the Fraternity [1882], 143; Charlotte Co. Marriage License; correspondence in David Q. Eggleston Papers, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia (UVA), Charlottesville, and in Eggleston Family Papers, VMHC; Charlotte Gazette, 6 Dec. 1883, 17 Nov. 1892, 12 Aug. 1897, 11 Apr., 2, 30 May, 4 July, 12 Dec. 1901; Glasgow Herald, 23 Aug. 1890; Richmond Dispatch, 12 June 1901; Richmond Times, 12 June 1901; Secretary of the Commonwealth, Election Records, 1776–1941, no. 47, State Government Records Collection, Record Group 13, Library of Virginia (LVA), Richmond; portrait in Virginia Convention of 1901–1902, unpublished bound photograph album of convention members [1902], copies at LVA, UVA, and VMHC; Journal of the Constitutional Convention of Virginia [1902], 24, 49–50, 487, 504, 535; Report of the Proceedings and Debates of the Constitutional Convention, State of Virginia (1906), esp. 586–598 (quotation on 598), 936–937, 1200–1204, 1207–1209, 1598–1601, 1631–1634, 1662–1667; election as Secretary of the Commonwealth in Journal of the House of Delegates of the State of Virginia, 1901–1902 session (1901) 74; obituaries in Richmond News Leader, Richmond Times-Dispatch, and Washington Post, all 18 Oct. 1909, and Charlotte Gazette, 21 Oct. 1909; memorial, with middle name of Quin and incorrect marriage date, in Virginia State Bar Association Proceedings (1910), 81–84 (portrait facing 81); variant middle name of Quinn on gravestone.
Image in Richmond Dispatch, 12 June 1901.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Marianne E. Julienne.
How to cite this page:
Marianne E. Julienne, "David Quin Eggleston (1857-1909," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2021 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Eggleston_David_Q, accessed [today's date]).
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