author
Louis Richards
1842–1924
A Pennsylvania lawyer and civic writer, he turned local history, legal practice, and his brief Civil War service into books that still offer a vivid window into 19th-century Reading. His work ranges from practical law manuals to a firsthand journal of the 1862 emergency campaign.
1 Audiobook
About the author
Born in 1842 at Gloucester Furnace, New Jersey, he later became a member of the Berks County bar in Pennsylvania and built a reputation as a law writer as well as a careful student of local history. Sources about him describe a long career closely tied to Reading and Berks County.
His best-known books show that mix of practical and historical interests. He wrote Eleven Days in the Militia during the War of the Rebellion, a memoir-like account of his service in the Pennsylvania emergency militia in 1862, and he also compiled substantial legal reference works including The Pennsylvania Form Book.
Louis Richards died in 1924. Though not a household name today, his writing preserves both the everyday machinery of the law and the texture of civic life in 19th-century Pennsylvania.