Frank Patteson Christian (18 November 1858–6 June 1933), judge of the Special Court of Appeals, was born in Lynchburg and was the son of Edward Dunscomb Christian, a prominent attorney, and Cornelia Burton Christian. His younger brother, William Asbury Christian, was a Methodist minister who wrote histories of Lynchburg and Richmond. Educated in private and public schools in Lynchburg but unable to afford a college education, Christian worked as a messenger for a telegraph company and taught for several years in the Lynchburg public schools. He studied law in his father's office and attended two sessions of the law school at the University of Virginia before beginning his practice in Lynchburg in 1887.

On 28 January 1890 Christian married Mary Lucretia Dearing, whose father, James Dearing, had been a Confederate brigadier general. Christian invested in local businesses, sat on the boards of three coal companies, and became a director of the First National Bank of Lynchburg. For many years he taught a Sunday school class at the Court Street Methodist Church and was active in the temperance movement and in local Democratic Party politics. By 1894 he chaired the Lynchburg Democratic Executive Committee. In 1897 Christian built a large Romanesque-style house on fashionable Madison Street, where with a small staff of domestic servants he and his wife raised their four sons and one daughter and also provided a home for his mother-in-law and later a son-in-law, a daughter-in-law, a grandchild, and a niece.

Christian was elected commonwealth's attorney of Lynchburg in 1890 and won reelection two years later. In 1894 the General Assembly elected him city judge of Lynchburg. After a revisal of the city charter in 1896, his title became judge of the corporation court. The legislature's Democratic majority reelected him without opposition in 1900, 1906, 1914, 1922, and 1930.

In the spring of 1924 the assembly created a Special Court of Appeals to sit for two years in order to alleviate a backlog of cases that the Supreme Court of Appeals could not rule on expeditiously. To serve on the new court the Supreme Court of Appeals selected four circuit court judges and Christian, the only municipal court judge chosen. The judges took their oaths of office on 23 June 1924, and by the time they completed their work on 25 June 1926, they had decided 124 cases. The following spring the assembly re-created the Special Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court of Appeals reappointed the members of the earlier court. Christian arrived one day late for the second court and did not take his seat until 20 July 1927. He and the other judges rendered 105 decisions and cleared their docket before the court's statutory authority expired on 18 December 1928. In all the cases for which the judges of the two Special Courts issued written opinions, the workload of writing for the majority was evenly distributed, but Christian filed nineteen dissents, nearly twice the number of all of the other judges combined.

Frank Patteson Christian continued to serve as judge of the corporation court of Lynchburg throughout his years on the Special Court of Appeals and was the senior municipal court judge in Virginia when he died of influenza in a Lynchburg hospital on 6 June 1933. He was buried in the city's Spring Hill Cemetery.

Sources Consulted:
Biographies in Lyon Gardiner Tyler, ed., Men of Mark in Virginia (1906–1909), 5:65–66, and Philip Alexander Bruce, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, and Richard L. Morton, History of Virginia (1924), 5:351 (portrait on 350); birth date in Christian family Bible records (1842–1887), Virginia Museum of History and Culture (VMHC), Richmond, Va.; Marriage Register, Lynchburg, Bureau of Vital Statistics (BVS), Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia (LVA); some letters in Dearing Family Papers, VMHC; W. Asbury Christian (brother), Lynchburg and Its People (1900), 386, 403, 416, 422, 428; S. Allen Chambers Jr., Lynchburg: An Architectural History (1981), 337–339; Lynchburg Daily Virginian, 29 Jan. 1890; Lynchburg News, 22 Apr. 1892, 20 Apr. 1894; Special Court of Appeals Order Book, 4:1, 133, 135, 136, 218, Record Group 107, LVA; opinions of Special Court of Appeals printed in Cases Decided in the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia [1830–1971], vols. 139–144, 146–151; obituaries, editorial tributes, and accounts of funeral in Lynchburg Daily Advance, 6, 8 June 1933, and Lynchburg News, 7, 9 June 1933.

Photograph in History of Virginia, 5:350.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Brent Tarter.

How to cite this page:
Brent Tarter, "Frank Patteson Christian (1858–1933)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2024 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Christian_Frank_Patteson, accessed [today's date]).

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