John Hunn (June 23, 1849 – September 1, 1926) was an American businessman and politician from Camden, Kent County, Delaware. The first governor elected after a reform of Delaware's state constitution and a compromise candidate, Hunn served from 1901 until 1905 and became the first of a multi-decade string of elected Republican Delaware governors. Early life and family Hunn was born in June 1849 near Odessa, Delaware, son of Quaker minister and farmer John and his initially non-Quaker wife Mary Swallow Hunn. Hunn's father, also John Hunn, was a noted abolitionist and superintendent of the Underground Railroad on the Delmarva Peninsula south of Wilmington, Delaware, the southernmost stationmaster in the United States. Shortly after the younger John's birth, the family lost their New Castle County farm, "Happy Valley," in a sheriff's sale because of $2500 in fines assessed against him by Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney in 1848 for helping a family of seven runaway slaves and their freedman father, although Delaware's chief justice in the original 1846 case had granted a writ of habeas corpus, freed the alleged slaves, and fellow abolitionist (and later co-defendant) Thomas Garrett called a coach to take them to Pennsylvania. The Hunn family then went to live with relatives at Magnolia, Delaware, and this John Hunn was educated at the Friends school in Camden, Delaware and later at the Friends School in Bordentown, New Jersey. After the American Civil War (during which members as Quakers could not serve in the military), the Hunn family moved to the Sea Islands of South Carolina where the elder Hunn and his schoolteacher daughter Eliza assisted freed blacks, and his father also helped collect customs duties at Beaufort. The younger John Hunn married Sarah Cowgill Emerson in 1874, and they had one child, Alice. They lived at 3 South Main Street in Camden and were members of the Camden Friends Meeting. Career The younger Hunn, known as "Honest John", grew up at Magnolia and Port Royal, South Carolina, where his father was working with the Freedmen's Bureau as well as collected customs duties. In 1876 this John Hunn returned to Delaware, permanently settled in Camden in Kent County (where he had attended school as a child) and began operating a merchandized fruit, lumber, and lime business in nearby Wyoming. He maintained this business throughout his life. At the turn of the twentieth century Delaware was going through a