Rutledge, James

Born: 1781-05-11 Charleston, South Carolina

Died: 1835-12-03 Menard County, Illinois

Rutledge lived in Georgia, Tennessee, and Kentucky with his family. In Kentucky, he married and started a family before moving his family to White County, Illinois, along with his nephew John M. Camron in 1813. Around 1825, he moved to Concord Creek in Sangamon County, Illinois. He had planned to build a mill, but he found the water was not sufficient and, instead, resettled slightly further south in 1828. The following year, Rutledge and Camron founded New Salem, Illinois on that site. In 1831, Rutledge converted his house into a tavern to take advantage of the incoming residents but sold it the following year. In 1833, he left New Salem and built a farm at Huron, Illinois. A few months after typhoid fever took the life of his daughter Ann, Rutledge also succumbed to the disease.

Gravestone, Old Concord Cemetery, Petersburg, IL; Benjamin P. Thomas, Lincoln's New Salem (Springfield, IL: Abraham Lincoln Association, 1934), 4-5, 7, 12-13; Kenneth J. Winkle, The Young Eagle: The Rise of Abraham Lincoln (Dallas: Taylor Trade, 2001), 103.