Andrew Coleman Hargrove was born 18 December 1837 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the son of John and Martha (Hinton) Hargrove, the former a native of Georgia, and the latter a native of North Carolina. An 1856 graduate of the University of Alabama, he read law under Judge E.W. Peck in Tuscaloosa, then entered Cumberland Law School at Lebanon, Tennessee in 1858. He transferred from there to Harvard Law School, receiving his LL.B. in 1859. He began practicing law in Tuscaloosa in 1860 in partnership with James Fitts. In 1861, he enlisted in the Warrior Guards, later transferring to Lumsden's Battery, where he rose to the rank of lieutenant and in which he served until wounded at Spanish Fort, Alabama, in April 1865, by a minie ball to the forehead which doctors were unable to remove. Increasingly severe headaches over the next thirty years caused him to take his own life on 6 December 1895.
Postwar, Hargrove practiced law with Philip Augustus Fitts (ca. 1866-1869) and was later in partnership with Burwell Boykin Lewis (1872?-1874?) and his son-in-law, Adrian S. Van de Graaff. He was a member of the State Constitutional Convention of 1875 and was a State Senator, 1876-1884. He served in the State House of Representatives, 1884-1885, and returned to and was President of the Senate, 1888-1892. He served as land commissioner to the University of Alabama, 1885-1895, and as professor of law at his alma mater, 1888-1895. In 1890, he was appointed a trustee to the Alabama State Asylum and in 1892, was elected president of the Alabama State Bar Association.
Hargrove was a Democrat, a steward in the Presbyterian Church, and a member of the Knights of Honor. On 5 December 1865, he married Cherokee Mims Jemison, daughter of Robert and Priscilla Cherokee (Taylor) Jemison. They had two children, Minnie Cherokee (1866- ) and Robert (1874-1909).
Source: Thomas M. Owen, "History of Alabama and Dictionary of Alabama Biography." Chicago: The S.J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1921. Vol. 3; the Tuscaloosa "Times," 1872-1874; the "Crimson White," December 12, 1895.
From the guide to the Andrew Coleman Hargrove Papers MSS. 0630., 1835-1911, (University Libraries Division of Special Collections, The University of Alabama)
