Dr. Charles A. Hunt

Charles A. Hunt was born in Trenton, New Jersey, on April 15, 1819, and lived there until his father’s death when he was thirteen. Upon relocating to Ohio, he discovered his passion for education and received his medical degree at the Ohio College of Medicine in Cincinnati in 1845. Two years later, he married Isabella Hopkins and began plying his practice across Indiana and Illinois before settling in Urbana in 1855. He had a stint in the pharmaceutical drug business as a founding member of the Hunt, Sim, and Lindley firm, which he ran until the outbreak of war. In his short-lived political career as the mayor of Urbana from 1859 to 1861, he took great interest in the growing college seminary project. He was opposed to the expansion of slavery. In his spare time, he read voraciously about the newest developments in politics, science, medicine, and surgery, published his opinions on them in medical journals and local papers, and added Corresponding Secretary of the Chicago Academy of Natural Science to his list of accomplishments.  

At the coming of the Civil War, he joined the Union Army as a surgeon for the 126th Illinois Infantry. He performed his duties ably throughout the first two years of the war, especially during Grant’s siege of Vicksburg, Mississippi when he treated malaria and dysentery bred from the nearby Yazoo River. The constant exposure to these unhealthy conditions and work strain took their toll on Hunt. He eventually had to be moved from the regimental hospital in Haines Bluff to the general hospital in Mound City for his illness. He died in August 1863, soon after Isabella arrived to tend to him. She survived him for fifty years. Two of their sons, Joseph and Cory, became druggists as well.