Boone, Levi D.

Born: 1808-12-08 Lexington, Kentucky

Died: 1882-01-24 Chicago, Illinois

The grand nephew of Daniel Boone, Levi D. Boone was the seventh son of Squire and Anne Grubbs Boone. Squire Boone died when Levi was nine, succumbing to wounds received at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. Squire's death left the family near poverty, and Levi struggled to obtain a decent education. Despite his straitened circumstances, Levi completed medical studies at Transylvania University at the age of twenty-one. In the spring of 1829, Boone moved to Edwardsville, Illinois. After a year of apprenticeship with Dr. Benjamin F. Edwards, Boone established a medical practice in Hillsboro, Illinois. During the Black Hawk War, Boone captained a company of mounted volunteers in Colonel Jacob Fry's 2nd Regiment. He also served as a surgeon in the 2nd Regiment. After his war service, Boone returned to Hillsboro, relocating to Chicago in 1836. He left medicine to become a secretary with the Chicago Marine & Life Insurance Company. The Panic of 1837 forced him to return to medicine, and he continued to practice until 1862, when ill-health forced his retirement. In 1848, Chicago officials appointed Boone to the position of city physician in the wake of the city's first outbreak of cholera. Boone remained city physician until 1851. He served six years as city alderman, and in 1855, he won election as mayor on the American Party ticket. Boone did not run for re-election in 1856. During the Civil War, Boone was arrested and imprisoned for complicity in the escape of a Confederate prisoner from Camp Douglas. At the behest of President Abraham Lincoln, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton ordered and secured Boone's release. After the war and his retirement from medicine, Boone became a financial agent for the western department of the Union Mutual Life Insurance Company. A Baptist from the age of seventeen, Boone was a long-time member and benefactor of the Michigan Avenue Baptist Church, Chicago. In 1833, he married Louisa M. Smith, with whom he had eleven children.

Gravestone, Rose Hill Cemetery and Mausoleum, Chicago, IL; Isaac H. Elliott, Record of the Services of Illinois Soldiers in the Black Hawk War 1831-32 and the Mexican War 1846-48 (Springfield, IL: Journal, 1902), 89; The Biographical Encyclopaedia of Illinois of the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: Galaxy, 1875), 260-61; The United States Biographical Dictionary and Portrait Gallery of Eminent and Self-Made Men: Illinois Volume (Chicago: American Biographical, 1876), 278-80.