Samuel Johnson Hitchcock

Samuel Johnson Hitchcock (February 4, 1786 – August 31, 1845) was an American lawyer and judge who taught at New Haven Law School, which was absorbed by Yale University as their Yale Law School. He was also a railroad executive who served as president of the Hartford and New Haven Railroads.

Early life Hitchcock was born on February 4, 1786 in Woodbury, Connecticut. He was the eldest of twelve children born to and Mary ( Johnson) Hitchcock and Benjamin Hitchcock (1760–1816). He went on to attend Yale College and graduated as the valedictorian of his in 1809. After attending Litchfield Law School in 1809, he studied under fellow Yale alumnus and lawyer Seth Perkins Staples, taught for two years at Fairfield Academy, before working as a tutor at Yale for several years until he resigned in 1814 and consequently passed the bar in New Haven.

Career In 1815, he entered practice in New Haven. From 1820 to 1824, he was a partner in Staples & Hitchcock. After he became a teacher at New Haven Law School, Hitchcock divided his time between his legal practice and his teaching equally. The school's affiliation with Yale began in the mid-1820s and in 1830, Hitchcock was made an instructor in law by Yale, even though his law school still remained separate. In 1842, he received an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from Yale and, in 1843, the school's students began receiving Yale degrees. In 1846, a formal act of the Yale Corporation made the law department a branch of the college.

Business career From its inception in 1833, he was a member of the first Board of Directors of the Hartford and New Haven Railroad. The first railroad built in the state of Connecticut and an important direct predecessor of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, he served as its President from 1837 to 1840. It built northwards from New Haven, opening its first segment in 1838, and reaching Hartford in December 1839. An agreement was signed with the New Haven and New York steamboat line to provide connecting steamboat service to New York City upon the railroad's opening.

He was also affiliated with the Farmington Canal Company. At the time of his death in 1845, he was working to establish a railroad between New Haven and Albany, New York.

After her death, Hitchcock married Narcissa ( Perry) Whittemore (1796–1854) on December 25, 1834 in Fredericksburg, Virginia. The daughter of merchant and ship owner Walter Perry and Elizabeth Burr ( Sturges) Perry, of Southport, she was the widow of Joseph Whittemore, of Fredericksburg, who died in Fairfield in July 1831. She died, eleven years later, while on a trip to Southport.

Samuel Whittemore Hitchcock, who graduated from Yale in 1856; he spent much of his life in France and Switzerland. an artist who married (and divorced) Henrietta Walker Richardson before marrying fellow artist Cecil Jay.