Stephen Wallace Dorsey

Stephen Wallace Dorsey (February 28, 1842 – March 20, 1916) was a Senator from Arkansas.

He was born in Benson, Rutland County, Vermont, February 28, 1842 and moved to Ohio and settled in Oberlin. He attended the public schools. During the Civil War served in the Union Army. After the war he returned to Ohio and settled in Sandusky where he was employed by the Sandusky Tool Co. and subsequently became its president. He was elected president of the Arkansas Railway Co. and moved to Arkansas and settled in Helena.

He was elected as a Republican to the United States Senate and served from March 4, 1873, to March 3, 1879. He did not run for reelection. He was a chairman of the Committee on District of Columbia (Forty-fifth Congress). He was a member of the Republican National Committee in 1880.

After Dorsey, no other Republican served as senior Senator from Arkansas until Tim Hutchinson in 1999, upon Dale Bumpers' retirement. No other Republican served in the class 3 Senate seat from Arkansas that Dorsey held until John Boozman in 2011.

He engaged in cattle raising and mining in New Mexico and Colorado and subsequently moved to Los Angeles, California, where he resided until his death on March 20, 1916. He was interred in Fairmount Cemetery in Denver, Colorado. Clayton, the seat of Union County, New Mexico is named for a son of Senator Dorsey.

References

• Stephen Wallace Dorsey at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress