Elliot D. Coleman

Elliot d’Evereaux Coleman, I (1881-May 26, 1963), was from 1936-1960 the sheriff of Tensas Parish in northeastern Louisiana. Earlier, he had been a state police bodyguard of U.S. Senator Huey P. Long, Jr., on September 8, 1935, the night of Long's assassination.

Early life

Coleman was born on the Live Oak Plantation in Waterproof in southern Tensas Parish, the son of E.D. Coleman and the former Lou Ellen Pollard. He was educated in the Waterproof public school, since closed.

Career as sheriff

At the age of seventeen, Coleman became a deputy sheriff under W.C. Young, the sheriff from 1880-1905 and Coleman's future father-in-law. Coleman served as a justice of the peace and was a member of the Tensas Parish Police Jury, the parish governing body akin to county commissions in other states. He was a delegate to the 1921 Louisiana Constitutional Convention, superseded by the conclave that met in Baton Rouge in 1973.

As one of the bodyguards of Huey Long, Coleman testified that he twice shot Carl Weiss, the young Baton Rouge physician confirmed as Long's assassin, though the Weiss family has long disputed the official version of events.

Coleman was a prohibition agent until he was elected sheriff in 1936. He remained sheriff until 1960, when he was unseated by his fellow Democrat William M. "Max" Seaman, the younger brother of Louisiana State Representative J.C. Seaman, also from Waterproof. At the time of his retirement, Coleman was at seventy-nine the oldest serving sheriff in Louisiana. Max Seaman was elected sheriff again in 1964 and 1968 but died in office in October 1968 and was succeeded by his chief deputy, William "Bill" Poe of Newellton, who served until 1984.

During his long tenure as sheriff, Coleman directed several fights to hold the Mississippi River within its levees. At the Tensas Parish centennial ceremony on April 6, 1943, Coleman delivered a speech "High Lights of High Waters", which recounted several occasions during which the river tore through the levees to inundate the alluviual farming area of Tensas and adjoining parishes. On that occasion, then District Attorney Jeff B. Snyder of Tallulah in neighboring Madison Parish, echoed Coleman's observances, saying that he could recall the time when there were "no levees, no bridges, ferries nor roads, but the richest soil in the world, more fertile than the Valley of the Nile River. It was a hunter's paradise."

Coleman was a delegate to the 1948 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which nominated the Truman/Barkley ticket.

Family

In 1907, Coleman married the former Jane Young, and the couple had three children, Louis Coleman, Jane Coleman, and Elliot D. Coleman, II. Coleman died in Ferriday in Concordia Parish, from which Tensas Parish was carved in 1843. He is interred at the Natchez City Cemetery in Natchez, Mississippi.

Some Coleman descendants still reside in Tensas Parish. His great-grandson, Elliot Coleman, IV, who was born some four years after Coleman’s passing, died in 2009 at the age of forty-two.

In 2005, Ferriday newspaper publisher Sam Hanna, Sr., filed one of his "One Man's Opinion" columns about Coleman's historical legacy.