Edward Ennis Eanes (22 January 1886–29 October 1956), civic leader, was born in Petersburg. His mother, Mary Ida Ross Eanes, raised him after his father, German Baker Eanes, died. Eanes attended the city's public schools and a military academy in Blackstone. After two years of study at the University of Virginia, he graduated with a law degree in 1907.

E. Ennis Eanes, or Ennis Eanes, as he was known, began practicing law in Emporia, the seat of Greensville County, where two major railroads intersected and where people who were engaged in agriculture and in the timber industry in nearby portions of Southampton and Sussex Counties also resorted for commercial purposes and legal advice. The growing town offered advantages for a young attorney, and Eanes quickly emerged as an influential resident. From 1911 to 1915 he edited the Emporia Independent, a semiweekly newspaper that became a weekly about 1913. An active lay member of the Main Street Methodist Church in Emporia, he taught Sunday school for more than forty years and for thirty years chaired the church's board of stewards. Eanes twice represented the district conference as a lay delegate at national Methodist conventions. On 20 February 1926 in Washington, D.C., he married Eleanor Heim Little, of Pennsylvania. They had two daughters.

As mayor of Emporia from July 1920 until August 1934, Eanes supervised the paving of streets, installation of a new water supply system, and construction of the Main Street Bridge over the Meherrin River. In 1931, during the Great Depression, his administration provided a tax refund of 25 percent to the town's taxpayers. Eanes also served from 1927 to 1934 as the first judge of the Greensville County Juvenile Court and from 1934 to 1936 as judge of the county's first Trial Justice Court, which handled misdemeanors and some minor civil matters. For about eighteen years he sat on the county school board, including a decade as president. In 1938 he began six years' service on the council of the new Virginia State Bar, the regulatory agency that oversaw the state's legal profession.

Eanes became legal counsel for the First National Bank of Emporia during the 1920s, joined the board of directors, won promotion to vice president, and in 1931 was elected president of the bank. The smaller of the two federally chartered banks in Emporia, the First National Bank survived the banking crisis of 1932–1933. Between 1935 and Eanes's death in 1956, the total value of deposits the bank held increased from $742,873 to more than $4.5 million. During the quarter century that he worked as the bank's president, the population of the town more than doubled. As a practicing attorney and one of the two bank presidents in town, he was strategically placed to influence the pace and direction of commercial change in Emporia and parts of the counties of Greensville, Southampton, and Sussex. Edward Ennis Eanes died of a heart attack at his home in Emporia shortly after midnight on 29 October 1956 and was buried in Emporia Cemetery.

Sources Consulted:
Self-reported birth date and birthplace in World War II Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards (1940–1947), RG 147, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; biography in Douglas Summers Brown et al., eds., Sketches of Greensville County, Virginia, 1650–1967, Second Edition, 1968–2000 (2000), 207–208 (with marriage date); Death Certificate, Greensville Co., Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; obituaries in Petersburg Progress-Index, 29 Oct. 1956 (died "last night"), and Richmond Times-Dispatch, 30 Oct. 1956 ("died Sunday," 28 Oct. 1956); memorial in Virginia State Bar Association Proceedings (1957), 126–127 (portrait facing 126).

Photograph in Proceedings of the Sixty-Seventh Annual Meeting of the Virginia State Bar Association (1957).

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Brent Tarter.

How to cite this page:
Brent Tarter, "Edward Ennis Eanes (1886–1956)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2023 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Eanes_Edward_Ennis, accessed [today's date]).

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