Courtney, James

Born: 1804-XX-XX Pennsylvania

Died: 1862-XX-XX

Flourished: 1854-11-20 Danville, Illinois

James Courtney, Methodist minister and physician, was licensed to preach at age eighteen. In 1838, he married Mary Elizabeth Clouse in Franklin County, Ohio, and the pair had nine children. Courtney and his family moved between Illinois and Indiana multiple times in the 1840s and 1850s and he also maintained an affiliation with Alva Curtis of Cincinnati, Ohio, in whose Physio-Medical College he taught obstetrics and practical medicine. He lived for a while in Middle Fork Township in Vermilion County, Illinois, where he continued to preach and served as a justice of the peace, then relocated to Danville and continued his study of medicine. Courtney represented Vermilion County in the Illinois House of Representatives, 1855 to 1856. By 1859, Courtney had returned to Tippecanoe County, Indiana, where he helped to establish the community of Stockwell and a Methodist Episcopal educational institution there.

H. W. Beckwith, History of Vermilion County (Chicago: H. H. Hill, 1879), 801-2, 811; Ohio, U.S., County Marriage Records, 1774-1993, 23 July 1838, Franklin County (Lehi, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, 2016); U.S. Census Office, Sixth Census of the United States (1840), Vermilion County, IL, 128; U.S. Census Office, Seventh Census of the United States (1850), Ward 4, Lafayette, Tippecanoe County, IN, 94; John S. Haller, Jr., Kindly Medicine: Physio-Medicalism in America, 1836-1911 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1997), 38; John Clayton, comp., The Illinois Fact Book and Historical Almanac, 1673-1968 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970), 220; John L. Smith, Indiana Methodism (Valparaiso, IN: n.p. 1892), 261; Biographical Record and Portrait Album of Tippecanoe County, Indiana (Chicago: Lewis, 1888), 323; U.S. Census Office, Eighth Census of the United States (1860), Tippecanoe County, IN, 72-73.