Judge John Dillard Cook was born in 1792 in Virginia. At the age of seven, Cook and his family moved from Virginia to Kentucky. In Kentucky, Cook worked on his father’s farm and began his study of law. At age 22, he joined the law office of General Talbert, a prominent lawyer in Frankfort, Kentucky, where he studied as an apprentice. He remained there, as a student, until his March 1814 admission to the bar in Franklin County, Kentucky. 

Cook arrived in Missouri in 1816 and established a law practice in Ste. Genevieve County. He was elected a member of the Territorial Council of Missouri two years later. Cook’s role as a public servant continued when he was selected by the people of Ste. Genevieve County as a delegate to the state convention, during which Missouri’s first constitution was drafted and adopted in July 1820.

Then-Governor Alexander McNair appointed Cook as one of the first judges of the Supreme Court of Missouri on November 16, 1820. He began his service with the Court during its March 1820 term and wrote the first opinion of the Court published in the Missouri Reports. Cook resigned from the Court in May 1823. McNair twice reappointed Cook to the Supreme Court of Missouri, and both times Cook declined.

 

In 1823, Cook later accepted the position of circuit judge in what was then the Tenth Judicial Circuit (in southeastern Missouri). He served as a circuit judge in the Tenth Judicial Circuit from 1823 to 1848, living in Cape Girardeau during that time. Cook helped expand courts in southeastern Missouri, beginning with Stoddard County in 1836, and then Dunklin and Mississippi counties in 1845. After Cook resigned from the bench in 1848, he served as United States district attorney for eastern Missouri from 1848 to 1850.

 

Judge John Dillard Cook died in 1852 in Cape Girardeau. He was approximately 60 years old.

“1850 United States Federal Census.” Information courtesy of Ancestry.com, accessed October 2017.

Buel Leopard, Floyd C. Shoemaker, eds., The Messages and Proclamations of the Governors of the State of Missouri, (Columbia, MO: The State Historical Society of Missouri, 1922), 46.

E.W. Stephens, “Memorial to Judge John D. Cook. Remarks of Hon. George Munger,” 325 Missouri Reports 1930, iii.

Louis Houck, ed., Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of the State of Missouri, from 1821 to 1827, (Cape Girardeau, MO: Kimball & Taylor, Printers, 1870), 2.

St. Louis Missouri Republican, Wednesday, May 28, 1823, page 2, column 5. Information courtesy of the SHSMO Newspaper Database, on State Historical Society of Missouri website, accessed June 2017.

William E. Parrish, Charles T. Jones, Jr., and Lawrence O. Christensen, Missouri: Heart of the Nation, 3rd edition, (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 2004), 57.