T. T. Fields

Thomas Theodore Fields, Jr., known as T. T. Fields (October 12, 1912 – January 17, 1994), was a Democratic member of the Louisiana House of Representatives from his native Farmerville in Union Parish in north Louisiana. He served from 1952 to 1964 and again from a combined Union and Morehouse parish district from 1968 to 1972. His service extended under Governors Robert F. Kennon, Earl Kemp Long, Jimmie Davis, and the second administration of John McKeithen.

Fields's namesake grandfather, Theodore Thomas Fields, I (1846-1921), was a newspaper editor in Avoyelles Parish in South Louisiana and a native ofDanville in Boyle County, Kentucky. Fields' father, Harvey Fields, a Marksville native, was a state senator for Union and Morehouse parishes from 1916 to 1920, a member of the Louisiana Public Service Commission from 1927 to 1936, and briefly a law partner of Huey Pierce Long, Jr.

Along with Fred Preaus, a Farmerville businessman who ran for governor in 1956, andState Senator B. R. Patton, Fields worked to make Lake D'Arbonne in Farmerville a reality. Popular with fisherman and boaters, the large man-made lake opened in 1963. Both Patton and Fields were unseated in the 1963-64 election cycle after Lake D'Arbonne had already opened.

After three terms in the state House, Fields four years later won a comeback bid in the general election held on February 6, 1968. He and former intraparty rival, James Peyton Smith, defeated the lone Republican candidate, Edwards Barham of Oak Ridge in Morehouse Parish, who polled 44 percent of the vote in a three-candidate field in which two wereelected. In 1975, Barham became the first Republican since Reconstruction to be elected to the Louisiana Senate. He served only one term until his defeat in 1979 by the Democrat David 'Bo' Ginn of Bastrop in Morehouse Parish.

Fields was married to Ruth Atcheson "Katie" Fields (1914-1993), whom he outlived by eight months. The couple and other family members are interred at Farmerville Cemetery in Farmerville.