Albion Winegar Tourgée was born in Williamsfield in 1838 and spent many of his formative years here after his family moved in 1847. He attended Kingsville Academy, where he met his future wife, Emma Kilbourne. He served in two Union regiments, the 27th NYVI and the 105th OVI, and after the war moved to North Carolina. There he rewrote the state constitution to include civil rights guarantees, served as a judge, and fought the Ku Klux Klan. He began his writing career in North Carolina and wrote his first two novels, including A Fool's Errand, a highly autobiographical account of his days as a carpetbagger. In 1881 he moved to Mayville, N.Y., where he continued an eclectic career as a newspaper columnist and publisher of the weekly news magazine Our Continent. He was the lead attorney for Homer Plessy in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, a case brought by an African American seeking the right to ride in a whites-only railroad car. Although Plessy lost, the legal basis for segregation was later overturned in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 using much of Tourgée's legal reasoning. In his brief for the Plessy case, Tourgée coined the phrase color-blind justice to describe what he believed should be the national norm. In 1897 he was appointed consul to Bordeaux, France, and served there until his death in 1905.