Swan, Hurlbut

Born: 1797-06-09 Connecticut

Died: 1878-05-15 Lake County, Illinois

Flourished: Lake County, Illinois

Hurlbut Swan was a farmer, local and county government official, and state legislator. He was baptized at the First Congregational Church of Old Lyme, Connecticut in 1809. Swan left his native Connecticut for Illinois in 1845 and in June of that year he purchased over 950 acres of land in Lake County. He represented Fremont township on the first Lake County Board of Supervisors in 1850. The following year, he was a founder and executive committee member of a county agricultural society. Swan served as supervisor of Fremont several times in the 1850s and 1860s and was town assessor in 1861. Swan represented Lake County at the Illinois Constitutional Convention in 1847 and was elected to the Illinois House of Representatives as a Free Soil Party candidate, serving 1851 to 1852 and 1855 to 1856. During the Civil War, he was appointed by the Lake County Board of Supervisors to a committee to finance enlistment bounties and other war support. Swan continued his connection to the Congregational Church in Illinois, serving as a deacon in a congregation that formed in Libertyville and afterwards moved to Fremont. He was married first to Nancy Clark and after her death in 1853 married Susan Carroll the following year; Swan was survived by three children from his first marriage and five from his second.

Connecticut Church Records, Index: Old Lyme First Congregational Church 1731-1874 (CT: Connecticut State Library, 1950), 119; William Booth Estabrook, Genealogy of the Estabrook Family, including the Esterbrook and Easterbrooks (Ithaca, NY: Andrus & Church, 1891), 84, 138; John J. Halsey, ed., A History of Lake County Illinois (Chicago: Harmegnies & Howell, 1912), 38, 117, 121-22, 135, 147-48, 438, 441, 822; The Past and Present of Lake County, Illinois (Chicago, Wm. Le Baron, 1877), 238; U.S. Census Office, Sixth Census of the United States (1840), Haddam, Middlesex County, CT, 402; Illinois Public Domain Land Tract Sales, Lake County, 686:96, 98, 99, Illinois State Archives, Springfield, IL; U.S. Census Office, Seventh Census of the United States (1850), Lake County, IL, 70; John Clayton, comp., The Illinois Fact Book and Historical Almanac, 1673-1968 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970), 218, 221; Illinois Statewide Marriage Index, Lake County, 16 June 1854, Illinois State Archives, Springfield, IL; U.S. Census Office, Eighth Census of the United States (1860), Lake County, IL, 447; The Waukegan Weekly Gazette (IL), 18 May 1878, 3:4; Gravestone, Ivanhoe Cemetery, Lake County, IL.