Justice John Vestal Hadley
(Forty-eighth Justice)

Justice Hadley was born in Hendricks County, Indiana, sometime between 1839 and 1842, and died November 17, 1915, in Danville, Indiana.³¹⁶

He attended Northwestern Christian (now Butler) University for one year before enlisting in the Union Army.³¹⁷

He served for three and one half years before the end of the Civil War.³¹⁸ He wrote a book regarding his experiences as a prisoner of war entitled, Seven Months a Prisoner.³¹⁹ He was wounded twice during the war and ultimately managed to escape from a POW camp in Columbia, South Carolina, and walk to Tennessee, where he found a camp of Union troops.³²⁰

After returning from the war, he studied at the Indianapolis Law School in 1866 and was admitted to the bar in the same year.³²¹ He was a circuit judge for eleven years and then served on the Indiana Supreme Court from January 1899 to January 1911.³²²

Source: Browning, Minde C., Richard Humphrey, and Bruce Kleinschmidt. "Biographical Sketches of Indiana Supreme Court Justices." Indiana Law Review: Vol. 30, No. 1, 1997. View this source in PDF format.