Henry L. Bridges

Who was Henry L. Bridges?

Henry L. Bridges, Sr., was a businessman who served from 1928 to 1932 and again from 1934 to 1936 as the mayor of the small city of Minden, the seat of Webster Parish in northwestern Louisiana.

Bridges was born in nearby rural Athens in Claiborne Parish but moved to Minden in 1907, where he operated a clothing store. He was first elected mayor in the Democratic primary in the spring of 1928, when Robert F. Kennon, then twenty-six and later the governor of Louisiana from 1952 to 1956, declined to seek a second two-year term. The position is now for a four-year term and is filled in the fall of non-presidential years.

Bridges was reelected on April 8, 1930, when he defeated Coleman Lindsey, later a state senator and the lieutenant governor in the abbreviated 1939–1940 term of Governor Earl Kemp Long. In that contest, Bridges polled 519 votes to 402 for Lindsey. In 1932, however, Bridges was unseated by his sole opponent, former Mayor Connell Fort, who had preceded Kennon in the position from 1922 to 1926. Fort polled 709 votes to Bridges's 437 in the primary held on April 12, 1932.