Thompson, Samuel M.

Born: 1801-02-12 Davidson County, Tennessee

Died: 1888-01-27 Ottawa County, Kansas

Samuel M. Thompson was a military instructor in Davidson and Dickson counties, Tennessee, before moving to Sangamon County, Illinois, about 1828 to work as a carpenter and builder. He soon returned to Davidson County where, in 1831, he married Cynthia McCrary, with whom he had five children. He resettled in Sangamon County that same year and volunteered in the Black Hawk War. Thompson mustered into the same company as Abraham Lincoln, and its members elected him as their first lieutenant. After the company joined with two others to become the Fourth Illinois Volunteer Mounted Regiment, the men elected Thompson as the regiment’s colonel. Following his discharge in 1832, Thompson moved to Beardstown, then relocated to Burlington, Iowa, in 1836. In 1846, during the Mexican War, he enlisted as a private under Colonel Edward D. Baker in the Fourth Regiment of Illinois Volunteers and was left by his unit in a hospital in Matamoros, Mexico late that same year. After his first wife died in 1843, Thompson married Nancy Waldon Sullivan in Mahaska County, Iowa about 1855. At the time of the 1860 census, they lived in Kansas Territory, where Thompson worked as a carpenter and owned real estate valued at $125 and possessed $350 in personal property. Thompson was a member of the Church of Christ.

John Carroll Power and S. A. Power, History of the Early Settlers of Sangamon County, Illinois (Springfield, IL: Edwin A. Wilson, 1876), 713; Tennessee, U.S., Marriage Records, 1780-2002, 17 February 1831, Davidson County (Lehi, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, 2008); Isaac H. Elliott, Record of the Services of Illinois Soldiers in the Black Hawk War, 1831-32, and in the Mexican War, 1846-8 (Springfield, IL: H. W. Rokker, 1882), 98-100, 292; U.S. Census Office, Sixth Census of the United States (1840), Des Moines County, IA Terr., 80; U.S. Census Office, Seventh Census of the United States (1850), Mahaska County, IA, 193; U.S. Census Office, Eighth Census of the United States (1860), Lykins County, KS Terr., 129; The Topeka Daily Capital (KS), 17 March 1887, 7:1-2; The Minneapolis Messenger (KS), 9 February 1888, 7:6; Gravestone, Fairview Cemetery, Ada, KS.