Biography - William Aylmer Winter
| William Aylmer Winter of Grenada, Representative from Grenada County, was born in that County, March 22, 1872. His father, William Brown Winter, was born in 1847, in the County of Yalobusha, Mississippi and passed his life as a resident of that County and of Grenada County. At the age of sixteen he enlisted as a Confederate soldier in Capt. William Forest's Company of Forest's cavalry, and notwithstanding his youth, bore an active part in all engagements of his company until the close of the War. |  |
He received his parole April 1865, in the State of Alabama, at Gainesville. He is the son of William H. and Elvira (Brown) Winter, who lived in Yalobusha County, and in the city of Grenada. The Winter family is of English origin. William Aylmer Winter's first American ancestor of that name settled in Elfton Hills, Maryland. Kittie Washington, his greatgrandmother, was a niece of Col. Wm. Washington, the victor of the Battle of Cowpena. The mother of Representative Winter, Amelia (Fisher) Winter, was the daughter of Ephraim S. Fisher and Martha (Townes) Fisher, who lived at Coffeeville, then at Panola, and later at Grenada, Mississippi. Judge Fisher was by profession a lawyer, and was from 1852 to 1856 a judge of the Mississippi High Court of Errors and Appeals. The Townes family is also of English descent. Capt. Isaac Brown, commander of the Confederae Ram. Arkansas, was Mr. Winter's great-uncle. William Aylmer Winter obtained his early education in the private and public schools of Grenada and Tallahatchie Counties. His college education was secured at the Iuka Normal Institute of Mississippi, where in 1891 he was graduated with the A.B. degree. Recognizing the fact that the profession of farming hold great opportunities for the man of education, Mr. Winter decided to devote himself to that work. He is one of the most respected and trusted men in his community and in casting about for a representative of their county in the State Legislature the people of his section selected him to represent them. In November, 1915, he was elected to this office and has represented his constituents faithfully and ably, and has served upon the following committees; Agriculture; Public Printing; Eleemosynary Institutions; Military Affairs. Mr. Winter is a Democrat, a Presbyterian, a Master Mason and a Woodmen of the World. He is unmarried.
There are also some references to Mr. Winter in his son's biography, former Governor William Winter at the Mississippi Department of Archives. For a full copy of this biography, Click Here.
An exerpt is below:
"Like most white Southerners, William Winter's early life experiences shaped his racial outlook. Winter was raised during the Great Depression on a farm ten miles northwest from Grenada in an isolated country outpost. His father farmed and served in the state legislature. The Winter place produced cotton and other crops, and the elder Winter was landlord to ten or so tenant families, mostly black but a couple of poor white households. The land had been in the Winter family since the early 1840's when William Winter's great-grandfather had settled the place soon after the removal of the Choctaws."
