Lawyers and Lawmakers of Kentucky, by H. Levin, editor, 1897. Published
by Lewis Publishing Company, Chicago.  Reprinted by Southern Historical
Press.  p. 85.  Livingston County.

CASWELL BENNETT, chief justice of the Kentucky court of appeals, was born
in Halifax county, Virginia, August 27, 1836, and died August 9, 1894. He
was of Scotch lineage and a son of Ambrose Bennett, a lawyer, who for
many years also followed farming in Halifax county.  Judge Bennett was
liberally educated in the schools of his native county, and continued his
studies in Millwood College in Tennessee.  He attended a law college in
Lebanon, Tennessee, and subsequently read law under the preceptorage of
Judge Joseph R. Underwood, of Bowling Green, Kentucky, and later under
the direction of Hon. F. H. Bristow, being admitted to the bar in 1857.
He located at Smithland, and was soon in command of a fair practice.  In
1867 he was elected circuit judge of the third judicial district, and on
the expiration of his first term was re-elected without opposition.  He
was elected judge of the court of appeals in 1886, and in 1892 became
chief justice.  His career on the bench added new honors to the
reputation which he had already won as a jurist.  At his death the bar
of the state and the court of appeals adopted the following resolutions:
     "The Hon. Caswell Bennett, late chief justice of the court of
appeals of Kentucky, was born in Virginia, but came early to Kentucky
and spent his boyhood and young manhood in the struggle of ambitious and
honest poverty for preferment.  Upon his admission to the bar he soon
acquired a lucrative practice and won and held in an eminent degree the
confidence and esteem of a generous but discriminating people.  His mind
was eminently a judicial one, and it was on his elevation to the bench of
the court of appeals that the opportunity came, in the full maturity of
his powers, for the illustration of his worth as a man, his ability as a
lawyer, his breadth and reach as a publicist and jurist.  He served
eight years on the bench of the supreme court, and in that time had deep
impress upon the current of judicial thought and tendencies.  As a man he
was upright, fearless, true to his convictions and impatient of wrong
and injustice; as a friend he was loyal to a fault; as a lawyer, careful,
wary and resourceful; and as a judge, patient, learned, industrious and
intrepid.  In his death the bench and bar of Kentucky have sustained an
irreparable loss."
     Judge Bennett was married in 1867 to Miss M. T. Cruce, daughter of
James W. Cruce, of Crittenden county, Kentucky.

Bennett Underwood Bristow Cruce
=
Crittenden-KY Warren-KY Halifax-VA TN

http://www.rootsweb.com/~kygenweb/kybiog/livingston/bennett.c2.txt