Thomas Ewing III

Thomas Ewing III (21 May 1862, Leavenworth, Kansas, USA – 7 December 1942, Yonkers, New York) was the 33rd Commissioner of the U.S. Patent Office, serving between 1913 and 1917. He was the son of General Thomas Ewing Jr. and the grandson of Secretary Thomas Ewing, Sr. Background Thomas was born during the Civil War, on 21 May 1862, at Leavenworth, Kansas, the second son of Thomas Ewing, Jr. (1829–1896) and his wife Ellen Ewing Cox (1833–1919). At that time, his father, Thomas Ewing, Jr., was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Kansas but he resigned his position to recruit an Army infantry regiment and to fight for the Union. His son was known as Thomas Ewing, Jr. until his father died and then he graduated to Thomas Ewing, Sr. But he was actually the fifth Thomas Ewing of his line. His great-great-great grandfather was the first Thomas Ewing, who came to America from Derry, Ireland, in 1718. On his mother's side, the fifth Thomas was the great grandson of a War of 1812 general and U.S. Congressman, Reasin Beall of Wooster, Ohio. Ewing grew up in Washington, D.C. (1865–1870), and Lancaster, Ohio (1870–1879), while his father worked as a lawyer and a U.S. Congressman. Education A graduate of public schools in Lancaster, Ohio, Thomas went to the College of Wooster for two years, from 1879 to 1881, and transferred to Columbia College of New York, where he would remain for seven years, until 1888. In these seven years, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1883 and a Master of Arts in 1886, worked as a tutor of physics for the School of Mines from 1885 to 1888, and went to the School of Law in his last year. Then he transferred again, this time to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. In 1890, he graduated with a Bachelor of Laws from there. By then, he had gained memberships in the Sigma Chi fraternity and, in 1885, the Phi Beta Kappa Society. He was later awarded an honorary Doctorate of Laws in 1914 by Georgetown University. Career While he was attending classes at Georgetown, Thomas also worked as an assistant examiner at the U.S. Patent Office, from October 1888 to October 1890, but, in 1891, he moved to New York City and became a patent attorney. For the next five years, he and his father, also a patent attorney, shared their law offices as Ewing & Ewing in Manhattan and their home in Yonkers, New York. But they had law partners. One of them was the General's son and Thomas's brother, Hampton Denman Ewing, Sr.