The influence of culture and broad professional and worldly experience upon a new community is visible in Idaho as the result of the work and the example of high-minded men like Charles L. Heitman of Rathdrum, Kootenai county, a lawyer who does honor to the law, to the courts, to himself and to the people among whom he lives and whose interests it devolves upon him to serve from day to day. Charles L. Heitman comes of an old North Carolina family, and is a son of Henry N. and Eve (McCrary) Heitman. His father was for sixty years a local preacher of the Methodist Episcopal Church, south, and for twenty years was clerk of the superior court of Davidson County. He died at the age of eighty-three years, his wife at sixty-five, and they are buried in the land of their birth and life. Charles L. Heitman was educated at Trinity College, in Randolph County, North Carolina, and was graduated at the head of his class, in 1876. During the succeeding two years he read law under the preceptorship of Chief Justice Pearson, at Richmond Hill, North Carolina. He was admitted to the bar of his native state in 1878 and practiced his profession at Lexington nine years. In 1890 he went to Idaho and located at Rathdrum, which then had a history covering nine years more or less, and he has attained a standing at the bar of Idaho second to that of no lawyer in the state. He is an unswerving Republican and takes an active part in the affairs of his party in his county and state, but he does not seek nor want office for himself. When, in 1894, he was given the honor of a nomination by his party for district judge, he declined, preferring to devote himself entirely to the practice of his profession. He is a good public speaker, apt in illustration and skillful in argument, and is in demand during political campaigns. His oratorical triumphs before judges and juries are among the most important successes of their kind in the legal annals of the state. His law library is one of the largest and best selected west of Chicago.
Mr. Heitman married Miss Stella Smith, of Rathdrum, Idaho, in January 1894, and has three children. He is a Free Mason and a Knight of Pythias.