Old Photograph Of Allan Pinkerton Who Was Born In The Gorbals Glasgow Scotland

Old photograph of Allan Pinkerton who was born, on 25 August 1819, in the Gorbals, Glasgow, Scotland. He was the son of William Pinkerton and his wife, Isobel McQueen. He left school at the age of 10 after his father's death. Pinkerton read voraciously and was largely self educated. A cooper by trade, Pinkerton was active in the Scottish Chartist movement as a young man. He secretly married Joan Carfrae, born 1822, died 1887, from Duddingston, then a singer, in Glasgow on 13 March 1842. Pinkerton emigrated to the United States in 1842. In 1843 Pinkerton heard of Dundee Township, Illinois, fifty miles north west of Chicago on the Fox River. He built a cabin and started a cooperage, sending for his wife in Chicago when their cabin was complete. As early as 1844, Pinkerton worked for the Chicago abolitionist leaders, and his Dundee home was a stop on the Underground Railroad. Pinkerton first got interested in criminal detective work while wandering through the wooded groves around Dundee, looking for trees to make barrel staves, when he came across a band of counterfeiters who may have been affiliated with the notorious Banditti of the Prairie. After observing their movements for some time he informed the local sheriff, who arrested them. This later led to Pinkerton being appointed, in 1849, as the first police detective in Chicago, Cook County, Illinois. In 1850, he partnered with Chicago attorney Edward Rucker in forming the North Western Police Agency, which later became Pinkerton & Co, and finally Pinkerton National Detective Agency. When the Civil War began, Pinkerton served as head of the Union Intelligence Service during the first two years, heading off an alleged assassination plot in Baltimore, Maryland while guarding Abraham Lincoln on his way to Washington, D.C. Allan Pinkerton died in Chicago on July 1, 1884. He is buried in Graceland Cemetery, Chicago. He is a member of the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame.



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