Philo Dunning

Philo Dunning (March 23, 1819 – September 10, 1900) was an American merchant and druggist from Madison, Wisconsin, who held a number of local office, spent a single one-year term as a Reform Party member of the Wisconsin State Assembly from Dane County,[1] and served on the state fisheries commission.

He arrived in Wisconsin Territory in 1840, and settled in Dane County, first in Blooming Grove, where he farmed, and later moved into downtown Madison, reportedly because "the railroad built its tracks across their front yard."

[4] For some years prior to 1877, he operated a sawmill on Clyde Creek in the nearby Town of Burke, which he either bought or built in 1841 (accounts differ).

In that same year he was elected to the Assembly's 2nd Dane County district (the Towns of Blooming Grove, Burke, Dunn and Windsor, and the City of Madison) as the candidate of the Reform Party (a short-lived coalition of Democrats, reform and Liberal Republicans, and Grangers which elected one Governor and a number of state legislators) with 1,388 votes, against 995 for former state senator Clement Warner, a Republican (the incumbent, Levi Baker Vilas, was not a candidate for re-election).

[13] He died on September 10, 1900, after suffering from paralysis for a year,[14] and he is buried in Madison's Forest Hill Cemetery.