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.

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.

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.

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