Free Graphics from the Timberlake Family Home Page!!

Professor Edgar W. Timberlake’s death, at his home in Wake Forest [VA] on January 19 [1957] starts bells ringing in memories of many grateful persons whose good fortune once allowed them to sit in his classes. He taught more students, it is believed, than any other of Wake Forest’s professors in its long history. Timberlake’s classes were usually large, the enrollment often reaching 80, the maximum capacity of his classroom. His teaching covered a period of fifty-two years, two at Oak Ridge Institute and fifty at Wake Forest College.

Professor Timberlake’s background was fitting for such a career. His father, Edwin Walter Timberlake, WFC ’74, was an able lawyer and a Superior Court judge. His maternal grandfather, William Gaston Simmons, WFC 1852, was a licensed attorney, but spent his mature life as an incomparable teacher, filling at one time or another almost every chair in the Wake Forest curriculum.

Young Edgar Timberlake followed naturally his father and grandfather in attending Wake Forest College. There he received an A. B. degree in 1901, taught two years at Oak Ridge, then, like his father, studied law at the University of Virginia, receiving the LL. B. degree in June 1905. Autumn following found him again at Wake Forest attending Professor N. Y. Gulley’s classes in preparation for the N. C. Bar examination in February.

Following his admission to the Bar in February 1906, Timberlake was elected in May to an associate professorship in the Wake Forest Law School, and began a teaching career that ended May, 1956, when the college moved to Winston-Salem.

Edgar W. Timberlake was the subject of a biographical paper prepared and read at Wake Forest by attorney Jesse A. Jones, WFC ’19, Kinston, May 19, 1953, when Professor Timberlake’s portrait was presented to the Law School by the Phi Alpha Delta legal fraternity.