JOHN FRANCIS MUDD, ESQUIRE FOUNDER ADMITTED TO THE MARYLAND BAR 1907 LAW PRACTICE 1907-1950 LAW PARTNER 1933-1950

In 1907 Oklahoma became the country's 46th state, Theodore Roosevelt was President and Charles W. Fairbanks was Vice President of the United States; our population was 87,008,000, the cost of a first class stamp was $0.02, Yale was the National Collegiate Athletic Association Football Champion, Florence Ziegfield brought us the Ziegfield Follies and science announced that our earth is 2.2 billion years old.

In 1907 the population of Charles County Maryland was 16,678 and in Annapolis, Maryland John Francis Mudd was admitted to the Practice of Law.

John Francis Mudd was born in Bryantown, Maryland on December 15, 1884, the son of the Clerk of the Circuit Court for Charles County, Maryland. He was admitted to the Maryland Bar after receiving degrees from St. Johns College, Annapolis and the University of Maryland School of Law.

He began practice in association with Edward J. Edelen in Hughesville, Maryland but shortly moved his office to the Charles County Seat of La Plata in association with attorney L. Allison Wilmer and later with attorney Walter J. Mitchell.

He was elected to the Maryland House of Delegates at age twenty-six (26) and after serving one term was elected to the Maryland State Senate where he also served one term, choosing not to seek reelection.

A lifelong Republican, his abilities nonetheless received recognition by Democratic Governors by way of appointments to membership on the Maryland State Roads Commission (1916), the Maryland State Racing Commission (1924) and People's Counsel to the State Public Service Commission (1938).

Always public spirited he served as a Member of the Architectural Design and Construction Committee for Physicians Memorial Hospital in 1936, Chairman of the Charles County Welfare Board and Editor of the Times Crescent, a local newspaper of his era.

In 1933 he was joined in his law practice by his son, Francis DeSales Mudd and the partnership of Mudd & Mudd Attorneys was formed, later establishing offices on the second floor of the venerable all purpose building known as Stumble Inn located on Charles Street in downtown LaPlata.

The ground floor of Stumble Inn provided a lunchroom, a bar with pool tables, two duckpin bowling lanes and a card room. The Inn served as a gathering place for all walks of life. The seemingly endless pitch game was open to judges, lawyers, doctors, merchants, farmers, schoolteachers and salesmen, all of whom rotated in and out of "the game" as a seat became available. It is reputed with substantial supportive evidence that more lawsuits were settled within the walls of Stumble Inn than the Courtrooms of Southern Maryland.

John Mudd quickly gained statewide notoriety as an outstanding attorney possessing extraordinary oratorical skills. In the days before television and endless entertainment opportunities a jury trial with John F. Mudd representing the defendant drew courtroom crowds often to overflow capacity.

Inclined by his nature to the side of the weak, the humble and the poor his "fee" frequently took the form of barter. Mr. Mudd is reputed to have taken on the task of defending a day laborer charged with the theft of a hog from a local farmer and to have suspiciously accepted for his services "two hams". Local lore has it that Mr. Mudd successfully defended his client with a closing jury argument in which he sought to assure the members of the jury (all of whom knew him well as a pillar of the community) that "the Defendant had no more of the pig alleged to have been stolen than did he."

John Francis Mudd passed away at his home in Bryantown on February 12, 1950.