Solon Borland - Early Life

Early Life

Borland was born in Suffolk, Virginia. When he was a youth, his family moved to North Carolina, where he attended preparatory schools. He later studied medicine and opened a practice. He married three times, first in 1831 to Hildah Wright of Virginia, who died in 1837, and with whom he had two sons. He then married Eliza Buck Hart of Memphis, Tennessee in 1839, but she died in 1842, with no offspring. In 1843 following his second wife's death, he moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, where he founded the Arkansas Banner, which became an influential newspaper in state-wide Democratic politics. Three years later, he challenged the editor of the rival Arkansas Gazette, a Whig paper, to a duel due to a slander published against Doctor Borland. In 1845 he had met Mary Isabel Melbourne, of Little Rock, with whom he would marry that same year and later have three children.