William Graves

William Henry Graves (born September 7, 1833 in Wytheville, Virginia or Knoxville, Tennessee; died July 29, 1931 in Asheville, North Carolina) was an attorney, scholar, real estate developer, and founder of the Graves Shale Brick Company.

Graves was the son of George Clinton Graves and the former Charlotte Logan Sprinkle. His parents resided in Knoxville during his childhood, but after their deaths he and his sister, Virginia, were raised in Wytheville with their mother's family. He enrolled at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg in 1854 and completed a bachelor of arts in 1856 and a baccalaureate in law in July 1857. For the next few years he practiced law successfully in Knoxville.

Graves volunteered for the Confederacy at the start of the Civil War. He sent all but one of his slaves to Georgia during the conflict. He began his service in Joseph Wheeler's Cavalry and earned his commission as an artillery captain in C. C. Crews's 1st Brigade. He contributed to the Confederate victory at Chickamauga in September 1863 and was present for General Joseph Johnston's surrender to W. T. Sherman at Bennett Place in April 1865.

Though his personal slave had left him after the surrender, Graves took his remaining horse and a mule and made his way to the plantation in Georgia where his other slaves had been sent. They presented him with $500 in gold which they had earned by hiring themselves out as labor in a nearby sawmill. With that money he renewed his career as an attorney in Montgomery, Alabama. On October 27, 1869 he married Florida Whiting, the daughter of South & North Alabama Railroad Co. president John Whiting. By 1884 the family, with three daughters, resided in the stately former Thomas Cowles residence on River Street. Graves' business increasingly involved him in the growth of the new city of Birmingham and he was named to succeed Henry Caldwell as president of the Birmingham Trust & Savings Company. In 1890 he sold his Montgomery mansion to the Atlantic Coast Line Railway and moved to Birmingham.