J. Young Scammon

Jonathan Young Scammon (July 27, 1812 – March 17, 1890) was an early settler in Chicago, Illinois, arriving in the city in 1835. He went on to become politically important as a lawyer, banker, and newspaper publisher. His first wife was Mary Ann Haven Dearborn, a niece of General Dearborn, with whom he had 3 children. His second wife was Maria Gardner Wright.^[1]

Biography

Scammon was born in Whitefield, Maine. In 1831, Scammon graduated from Waterville College. He came to Chicago when he was twenty-three. An attorney and a Whig, upon arriving in the city, he entered a legal partnership with Buckner Stith Morris, who was himself recently arrived from Kentucky. Their partnership lasted less than a year before Morris left the practice. In 1843, he served as the court reporter for the Illinois Supreme Court.^[2]

In 1844, Scammon founded the city's first newspaper, the Chicago Journal, a Whig-leaning newspaper that eventually became a Republican newspaper. Several years later, in 1861, Scammon sued the Democratic Chicago Democrat for libel after publisher John Wentworth published a cartoon which depicted Scammon as a wildcat banker. Scammon dropped the quarter million dollar suit only after Wentworth closed his paper, giving the subscription list to the Chicago Tribune.

Along with founding Mayor William Butler Ogden (whose grandnephew would later marry Scammon's sister-in-law), he built the first railroad from Chicago in 1848, the Galena and Chicago Union Railroad, which ran from Chicago to a point ten miles west of town. When Eastern financiers refused to support the railroad, Ogden and Scammon raised the money by riding on horseback along the proposed route and taking donations from the farmers he passed. He also created the charter for the Chicago Public School System in 1837.

Branching out, in 1851, Scammon founded the Marine Bank. He served as President of the Chicago Board of Education. He helped create Oak Woods Cemetery in 1854 and was the cemetery's first president. In 1856, a group of men meeting in Scammon's law offices created the Chicago Historical Society. He has a large portrait painted by the famous portrait painter George Healy who painted Abraham Lincoln. Scammon was a friend and had a law office in the same building as Abraham Lincoln in Chicago on Lake Street. Lincoln's son Robert Todd Lincoln studied under Scammon in his law offices. Scammon was Reporter for the Illinois Supreme Court from 1839-1845. He was a city Alderman in 1845 and a state Senator from 1860-1862.

Scammon was apparently active in the Underground Railroad, although he never publicly admitted as such. When he was accused of working to help slaves escape from law officers, he was asked what he would do if called upon to be part of a posse to capture fugitive slaves. Scammon replied, "I would certainly obey the summons, but I should probably stub my toe and fall down before I reached him."^[3]

In 1863, when the Chicago Astronomical Society determined to build an observatory affiliated with the University of Chicago, Scammon offered to pay for the construction of the observatory tower and dome as long as the observatory was named after his wife, Mary Ann Haven Dearborn. The group took him up on it and named the building the Dearborn Observatory. Scammon also paid the director's salary until he hit financial difficulties following the Great Chicago Fire in 1871.

In 1870, he donated the land and buildings for the Scammon Hospital, which was renamed following the Fire to the Hahnemann Hospital.

Scammon died in Chicago in 1890.

He is the brother of Eliakim P. Scammon who was a career officer in the United States Army and Brigadier General in the Union Army. He is also the brother of Charles Melville Scammon who is a 19th-century whaleman, naturalist and author of Marine Mammals of the Northwestern Coast (1874). Scammon's Lagoon off Baja is named after him.

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