Portrait of a Board Member:
Laura Wheaton

Recently elected as the new Chair of the Friends of Henderson Library Board, Laura Wheaton has spent many hours in libraries  -- but much of that in a location which many library users would find forbidding: the law section where row after row of fat law books reside.

She was born in the Midwest and obtained her first degree, a Bachelors in Humanities and Sociology, at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg. She met her future husband while a Master’s candidate at the University of Georgia, then they returned to the Midwest.  Both moved to Statesboro in 1998 when Patrick became a professor here in the Communication Arts Dept.  He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Georgia while Laura completed three years of law school there.  She looks back on those three years as formative in the skills of critical thinking and rational inquiry which were inculcated.  At the Georgia Law Review, she worked as a notes editor, checking out the footnotes and citations of articles for accuracy.

Ms. Wheaton is now an attorney in the firm of Brown, Rountree & Stewart, whose offices are housed in a vintage building behind the Buggy and Wagon Building.  She finds that her work stretches the mind, requiring flexibility and a broad knowledge, since everyday involves a different case in a different area of the law.  The firm itself has an impressive law library, as well as WestLaw and Lexis, but she has frequently visited Henderson Library to look up government documents or codes of federal regulations.  As a booklover, she prefers the experience of looking up legal information in books instead of online, and the presence of other, surrounding cases or statutes provides perspective on the one she needs.

Ms. Wheaton’s busy schedule – she also has a small child – allows little time to indulge in reading for pleasure the classic novels and works of history she would enjoy.  As well as her legal work, she serves as President of the Glen Oaks Homeowners Association and Vice President of the Bulloch County Bar Association.  Her interest in doing things for the community has now led her to add the Friends of Henderson Library Board to her other commitments.