William Benton Boggs

William Benton Boggs (October 8, 1854 – February 18, 1922)^[1] was an exchange broker and Democratic politician from his adopted community of Plain Dealing in northern Bossier Parish in northwestern Louisiana.

He was elected in the spring of 1890 as the founding mayor of Plain Dealing. From 1892 to 1900, he represented Bossier Parish in the Louisiana House of Representatives.^[2] From 1908 to 1916, he was a member of the Louisiana State Senate for Bossier and neighboring Webster parishes.^[3]

Boggs was a native of Calhoun County in northeastern Alabama, which was formerly known as Benton County but renamed in 1858 for John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. Boggs was a son of Samuel J. Boggs and the former Lucinda E. Barnett. At the age of thirty-three, he was the first and foremost buyer of lots at a July 1888 auction in Plain Dealing, located just south of the Arkansas state line. In 1880, he married the former Estella Swindle, the daughter of his former employer, the merchant J. J. Swindle. He then married Lena Jones (1874-1963),^[4] whose father owned a store on Palmetto Avenue in Plain Dealing. Boggs organized the first bank in Plain Dealing; chartered in 1904, it failed in 1921,^[5] the year before his death.

In addition to his tenure in both houses of the Louisiana State Legislature, Boggs was a delegate to the Louisiana Constitutional Convention of 1898.^[6]

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