BAY MINETTE, Ala. -- Llewellyn "Lew" M. Toulmin has yet to find the southwest Alabama grave of his fascinating and influential ancestor, a man who helped end a power struggle that threatened the young United States of America.
But Lew Toulmin said he's excited that the legacy of Judge Harry Toulmin (1766-1823), his great-great-great-great-grandfather, will find new life soon with a monument at Baldwin County's Courthouse Square.
"He was really quite a guy," said Toulmin, an international banking consultant from Silver Spring, Md., who spends winters in Fairhope.
In 2007, Toulmin found a gravesite in the community of Washington Courthouse near Millry in Washington County that he hoped was that of the judge. He now believes it isn't and will continue the search.
Meanwhile, a series of events this fall have led to plans to honor the renowned jurist in the Baldwin County seat.
Local officials are working to place a $3,000 marker on the south lawn of the county courthouse in Bay Minette to honor the man appointed by President Thomas Jefferson in 1804 to be a federal judge for the district that included what is now Baldwin County.
Toulmin said this will be more fitting than his original request -- to name a bridge in the Styx River community after the judge.
"As a person, I think he was really remarkable in his ability to write, to think, to analyze legal situations and political situations," Lew Toulmin said. "He was not just a judge, but he was acting as an ambassador to Spain, preventing war with Spain, resolving problems with the Indians. ... It would take an army of civil servants today to do what he did then."
Judge Toulmin stopped several groups intent on seizing Mobile from Spanish control -- an act that likely would have prompted another war that the young nation couldn't afford so soon after defeating the British.
"The pressure to grab that territory for the U.S. was great. But Jefferson and his successors said, 'Don't let that happen, don't let war break out,'" Toulmin said. "He was not a popular guy, but he was doing what he was told by the president."
It was Toulmin's encounter with Aaron Burr that was the most pivotal. Had the former vice president succeeded in carving out a settlement in Louisiana, it also could have led to war, according to historians.
So while Judge Toulmin was asked by his political benefactor to issue the warrant, it likely was not an easy decision, Lew Toulmin contends. Another federal judge in the Mississippi territory had refused to make the arrest, he said.
"I don't think it was political in the sense of partisan politics. He knew the president wanted Aaron Burr arrested. ... But the legal situation was murky. It was possible to strike off and go into the middle of nowhere and say, 'I'm the king of this area,'" he said of Burr's reported plans. "But if (Burr) had grabbed that territory it might have led to some kind of conflict."
John Jackson, director of the county Department of Archives and History, said a date for the dedication of the boulder and bronze plaque hasn't been set, but hopes it will be Dec. 21 at the end of the county's bicentennial year.
The marker will include a silhouette of Toulmin and a synopsis of his accomplishments.
Local attorney and legal historian Sam Crosby said, "Baldwin County enjoys the richest legal heritage of any area of the state and our most important legal historical figure is Judge Harry Toulmin."
A Unitarian minister who emigrated from England to the U.S. in search of religious freedom, Toulmin also was president of Transylvania University in Kentucky, wrote the first collection of the laws of Alabama and served as Baldwin's sole delegate to the state Constitutional Convention.
No actual portrait of Judge Toulmin has been found, said David Brewer, an assistant county administrator.
Transylvania University commissioned an artist to paint its early presidents, but he had to find a model whose features and general bone structure were similar to that in the silhouette profile, Brewer said.
Commissioners decided last week not to buy a large copy of that portrait likeness for the courthouse.