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Grenville Gaines

American politician and lawyer (1854–1922)

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionApr 21, 2026
Entity authorityQ117912726 ↗
Source-derived summary

Grenville Gaines (September 26, 1854 – May 2, 1922) was an American politician, lawyer and banker from Virginia. He served as mayor of Warrenton in the 1890s.

Early life

Grenville Gaines was born on September 26, 1854, in Warrenton, Virginia, to Mary Mildred (née Foster) and William Henry Gaines. His grandfather James Foster was a planter in Prince William County and a Virginia state politician. He studied at Bethel Military Academy from 1869 to 1870. He attended Virginia Military Institute from 1870 to 1874 and graduated in the class of 1874 as a civil engineer. He graduated from the University of Virginia School of Law with a Bachelor of Laws in July 1876. He was then admitted to the bar.

Career

Gaines started a law practice in Warrenton in 1876.

Gaines served as mayor of Warrenton for four terms, concluding in 1895.

Editorial summary

“Grenville Gaines” enters the record as american politician and lawyer (1854–1922). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Grenville, Gaines and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewStrongest as a route into the people, institutions and dated events that shaped the subject’s public record. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1854, 1922, 1869, 1870—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1854-09-26. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Grenville, Gaines and American.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Grenville Gaines” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Grenville, Gaines and American provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q117912726. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1854, 1922, 1869 and 1870.

Critical limits

A concise life account rarely captures disputed attribution, private networks or the changing language used to describe a career. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Grenville Gaines”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Grenville Gaines primary sources, Grenville Gaines archive and Grenville research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Grenville Gaines”?
  2. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
  3. Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Grenville Gaines” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.