Little, Wallace A.

Born: 1814-05-16 Vermont

Died: 1872-03-14 Elizabeth, Illinois

Flourished: Elizabeth, Illinois

Wallace A. Little was a physician, state legislator, sutler, and merchant. A native of Morristown, Vermont, he studied medicine at Dartmouth College in the 1830s then moved to Illinois about 1838, taking up the practice of medicine in Joliet. He married Charlotte B. Gibbs in 1840 and the pair raised three children. They lived in Fair Play, Wisconsin between 1842 and 1845, then settled permanently in Elizabeth, Illinois. Little represented Jo Daviess County in the Illinois House of Representatives, 1855 to 1856. During the Civil War, he was a sutler with the Ninety-Sixth Infantry Regiment of Illinois Volunteers. After the war, he gave up medicine and joined a mercantile partnership. A contemporary described him as a Free-soil Whig in 1854 and he was later a Republican. Little belonged to a Methodist church in Elizabeth.

A Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Dartmouth College. September, 1836 (Windsor, VT: Chronicle Press [1836]), 9; Illinois Statewide Marriage Index, Will County, 8 January 1840, Illinois State Archives, Springfield, IL; U.S. Census Office, Seventh Census of the United States (1850), Jo Daviess County, IL, 185; Elihu B. Washburne to Abraham Lincoln; John Clayton, comp., The Illinois Fact Book and Historical Almanac, 1673-1968 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970), 221; U.S. Census Office, Eighth Census of the United States (1860), Jo Daviess County, IL, 609; Galena Evening Gazette (IL), 16 March 1872, 3:2; The Chicago Tribune (IL), 19 March 1872, 4:8; Gravestone, Elizabeth City Cemetery, Jo Daviess County, IL.