Huffman, Samuel

Born: 1806-04-XX Virginia

Died: 1900-02-27 Missouri

Samuel Huffman was a Methodist minister and church elder, justice of the peace, state legislator, and U.S. Army chaplain. He was a Whig at least as early as 1844, and a minister at least as early as 1845. He served in the Illinois House of Representatives as a representative for Vermilion County, Illinois, from December 7, 1846 to March 1, 1847. In 1846, Huffman also served as secretary for the Illinois branch of the American Colonization Society. In April 1849, he was one of the founding members of the Danville and Perryville Plank Road Company, which was incorporated to construct a road from Danville, Illinois to the state line in the direction of Perryville, Indiana. In February 1850, he married Miranda Boswell, with whom he had at least eight children. In 1850, Huffman was working as a brick mason and owned real estate valued at $1,000. He became a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1851. In 1853, he served as a justice of the peace in Danville. From 1858 to 1861, he was presiding elder of the St. Louis, Missouri District of the Methodist Episcopal Church. In June 1861, Huffman took a chaplaincy in the Sixth Regiment of the Missouri Infantry of the U.S. Army, which he held until September 1862. Later that year, Huffman moved to Savannah, Missouri, where he remained until his death.

Sangamo Journal (Springfield, IL), 14 March 1844, 3:2; 13 February 1845, 2:6; 31 December 1846, 3:5; Merton Lynn Dillon, "The Antislavery Movement in Illinois: 1824-1835," Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 47 (Summer 1954), 160-61; Blue Book of the State of Illinois (Springfield, IL: Phillips Bros., 1903), 309; “An Act Legalising the Incorporation of the Danville and Perryville, and Georgetown and Perryville Plank Road Company,” 13 April 1849, Private Laws of Illinois (1849), 61-62; Illinois, U.S., Compiled Marriages, 1791-1850 (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, 1997); U.S. Census Office, Seventh Census of the United States (1850), District 21, Vermilion County, IL, 320; Robert Sidney Douglass, History of Southeast Missouri: A Narrative Account of Its Historical Progress, Its People and Its Principal Interests (Chicago: Lewis, 1912), 1:462; Charles Elliott, South-Western Methodism: A History of the M. E. Church in the South-West, from 1844 to 1864 (Cincinnati: Poe & Hitchcock, 1868), 288; The Holt County Sentinel (Oregon, MO), 9 March 1900, 1:2.