JOHN DEAN CATON.

1812-1895.

BY

MITCHELL DAVIS FOLLANSBEE.

of the Illinois Bar.

ALTHOUGH John Dean Caton died only

twelve years ago, it is, perhaps, not too soon

to consider what his opportunities, experiences and characteristics were, and in a measure to estimate the value of his contributions to the legal strength of his adopted state. He conducted the first jury cases ever tried in Cook, Will and Kane counties. For twenty-two years he was on the bench of the Supreme Court of Illinois. When still in middle life he left the bench and became a pioneer business man, as before middle life he had been a pioneer lawyer. He was thus an early example of the practitioner leaving his profession to engage in the business activities for which he had been fitted by hard work, long attention to facts, and legal learning. During his life in Chicago he saw the rough frontier town that had not yet known the luxury of litigation, a place of plain living and rude entertainment, develop into the Chicago which planned and achieved the World's Fair. When he came to the

bar, the reports of the Supreme Court of Illinois were contained in one small, bound volume, and a law library consisting of the Revised Statutes was considered ample for the practitioner. He aided greatly in changing this, for through thirty volumes of the reports he gave his impressions of law and justice to the new state, and in a simple, lucid style made his impress upon its jurisprudence. For more than sixty years, indeed, he played a strong part in the work of building up the city and state, and when he died he had gathered a harvest in an honorable professional and business life, and he left behind him not only the memory of being a successful man of sound judgment in practical affairs, but also the memory of intellectual ability and scrupulous integrity.

John Dean Caton was a native of Orange County, New York. His father, Robert Caton, entered the Revolutionary Army from Virginia, but at the close of the war settled on a farm near the Hudson River. When he laid down his arms as a soldier, he became a preacher in the Society of Friends, of which he was a devoted member. His son John, who was born in 1812, was the fifteenth child and the twelfth son. The father died three years later and the family moved to Oneida County, where at the age of five the boy began to attend the district school. Until he was seventeen, he worked on the farm during the spring and summer, attending school in the winter months. Then, after studying for a year at the