Rufus A. Ayers

Rufus Adolphus Ayers (May 20, 1849 – May 14, 1926) was a Virginia lawyer, businessman, and politician, who served as Attorney General of Virginia.

Ayers was born in Bedford County, Virginia. His family set out for Texas, but passed through Goodson (now Bristol) en route, and decided to stay there. Ayers attended Goodson Academy until it was closed at the start of the Civil War. He never went to school again, for the rest of his life. At age 14, young Ayers ran away and joined the Confederate Army. Although under age, Ayers served for some months as a soldier in East Tennessee.

After the war, Ayers went into business at age 19 in Estillville, now Gate City, Virginia. Encouraged by his uncle, a judge in Bedford, he began to study law and was admitted to the bar in 1872. In 1875, Ayers became the Commonwealth's Attorney for Scott County, Virginia, serving until 1879. Expanding his political career, Ayers served as reading clerk for the House of Delegates from 1875 to 1879, and was appointed a district supervisor by President Rutherford B. Hayes for the 1880 census.

Ayers became one of Southwest Virginia's industrial development leaders. In 1876, Ayers obtained a charter for a railroad from Bristol to Big Stone Gap. That same year he founded the Scott Banner. He participated in the founding of Virginia Coal & Iron Co., which became Virginia's largest coal company, and many other coal companies, as well as banks, a telephone company, and other businesses, and he owned the Big Stone Gap Post.

Ayers became involved with Virginia politics as a member of the Democratic State Committee of the Ninth Congressional District in 1883. The next year, he was Vice-President of the Virginia delegation to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, at which Grover Cleveland was nominated.

In 1885, Virginia's Democrats nominated Ayers as their candidate for Attorney General, along with Fitzhugh Lee for governor and John E. Massey for lieutenant governor. Besides Ayers, once the under-aged private, the other leading candidate for the nomination was James A. Walker, who had been a Confederate Army general. In the general election, Ayers defeated the incumbent Republican Frank S. Blair. Following the inauguration of Lee, Massey, and Ayers in 1886, the Democrats would control Virginia's statewide offices until 1970.

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