Pinckney, Daniel J.

Born: 1818-01-01 New York

Died: 1883-06-17 Chicago, Illinois

Flourished: Mount Morris, Illinois

Daniel J. Pinckney was a farmer, educator, merchant, newspaper editor, and state legislator. Born in Ulysses, New York, Pinckney studied at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, earning an M.A. degree in 1841. He taught at Genesee Wesleyan Seminary in Lima, New York, before moving to Mount Morris, Illinois to act as principal of the Methodist Episcopal Rock River Seminary in 1842. He held this position until 1855, with periodic breaks due in part to ill health. Pinckney married Margaret C. Hitt in 1844 and the pair had four children who lived to adulthood. Pinckney briefly managed a store in Mount Morris in the 1840s and partnered in a general store in the early 1850s. In 1850 and 1851, he edited the Mount Morris Gazette. Pinckney was a member of the Illinois Constitutional Convention in 1847 and represented Ogle County in the Illinois House of Representatives, 1855 to 1858 and 1865 to 1866, and in the Illinois Senate, 1867 to 1869. He served as a vice president in the Illinois Colonization Society. By 1860, he possessed $20,000 in real estate and $1,500 in personal property.

Alumni Record of Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn., 3d ed. (Hartford, CT: Case, Lockwood & Brainard, 1883), 45; Supplement to the Alumni Record of Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn., 7th ed. (Portland, CT: Middlesex County Printery, 1905), 114; Harvey J. Kable and Harry G. Kable, Mount Morris: Past and Present (Mount Morris, IL: Mount Morris Index Print, 1900), 34, 80, 86-89, 140-41; Illinois Statewide Marriage Index, Ogle County, 21 July 1844, Illinois State Archives, Springfield, IL; U.S. Census Office, Seventh Census of the United States (1850), Mount Morris, Ogle County, IL, 14; John Clayton, comp., The Illinois Fact Book and Historical Almanac, 1673-1968 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970), 221, 222, 226, 227, 228; The Illinois State Journal (Springfield), 10 February 1858, 1:4; U.S. Census Office, Eighth Census of the United States (1860), Mount Morris, Ogle County, IL, 544; The Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago, IL), 18 June 1883, 5:3; Gravestone, Oakwood Cemetery, Mount Morris, IL.