Will County IL Archives Biographies.....Jordan, Clifton Wing 
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Author: Past and Present of Will County, IL; 1907

Clifton Wing Jordan, the subject of this sketch, is one of the best known life 
insurance men in northern Illinois. In 1894 he became the general agent of the 
Union Central Life Insurance Company of Cincinnati, Ohio, having charge of the 
territory embraced in Will and Grundy counties. He has made a marked success 
of his business and has built up a large clientage among the heavy insurers in 
his district. Mr. Jordan was born on his father's farm at White Willow, 
Kendall county, August 24, 1860. He received his education from his mother and 
in the schools of Morris, Illinois. He started in business with his father, 
who was a large dealer in agricultural implements with headquarters at Morris 
and branch stores in Joliet and eighteen other towns in this vicinity, and 
later he went on the road representing the Avery Corn Planter Company of 
Peoria. This business took him extensively over the western states. On 
December 12, 1888, he married Miss Julia E. Ray, only child of Lieutenant 
Governor Lyman B. Ray, of Morris, and granddaughter of Judge J. N. Reading, 
prominent at the Morris bar for many years. In the spring of 1889 Mr. Jordan 
came to Joliet to live. He was for several years in the state grain 
inspector's office in Chicago and resigned to take his present position with 
the Union Central Life Insurance Company. He is a member of several clubs and 
is one of the founders of the Commercial Club of Joliet. Mr. Jordan has two 
children: Celia Reading, born July 29, 1892; and Lyman Ray, born December 10, 
1893. Mr. Jordan is the oldest son of William A. Jordan who came to Kendall 
county in 1847 when the prairie was unsettled. He was among the first to 
realize that the open prairie and not the timber along the streams was the 
choicest land of northern Illinois. He located a farm, called it White Willow 
after trees of that name planted by himself. The government made his house a 
postoffice and him the first postmaster. In 1867 he moved to Minooka and 
established the agricultural implement business above mentioned. In 1870 he 
moved to Morris, the county seat, where he had located one of his implement 
houses. He was very active in business and in the public affairs of his city 
and was postmaster at Morris for four years. In 1886 failing health caused him 
to retire and he went to Daytona, Florida, where he lived until 1897, when he 
returned north and died at his son's home in Joliet, October 13, 1897. On 
November 1, 1853, William A. Jordan married Annie Eliza Spooner Wing at 
Ottawa, Illinois. They had seven children four of whom lived to man and 
womanhood. Kate Dayton, born April 25, 1858, married Dr. Myron H. Hewett; 
Clifton Wing, born August 24, 1860, married Julia E. Ray; Anna Maria Freeman, 
born March 25, 1867, married Dr. E. D. Chapman; and Frank Ross, born July 9, 
1869, is unmarried. The Jordan family has been in America many years. The 
first known of them, a native of Ireland, came to New York, early in the 
eighteenth century. He had a son, William Jordan, who was born September 2, 
1751, at North Castle, Westchester county, New York. He married Ruth Ferris, 
who was born January 29, 1755. He was in the American revolutionary army and 
held the rank of major. He died June 10, 1833. He had eleven children, of whom 
Allen Jordan, grandfather of our subject, born February 3, 1799, was the 
youngest. Allen Jordan was a lawyer of unusual talents, practiced twenty-one 
years at Hudson, New York, but a paralytic stroke compelled him to give up 
active practice and he came west with his son William A. and settled in 
Kendall county, Illinois, moved to Plainfield in 1866, where he lived until a 
short time before his death in his ninetieth year. He was, while in New York, 
a great friend of William H. Seward and when Kendall county was organized into 
townships, ha caused his town to be named after his distinguished friend. The 
mother of our subject was Annie Maria Spooner Wing, who came from her native 
town, Sandwich, Massachusetts, with her widowed mother and family to Ottawa 
Illinois, in 1850. She was a descendent of Deborah, who was the first known 
Wing to settle in America. Deborah was the widow of Rev. John Wing, a famous 
non-conformist minister, who had lived in Holland and England. In June, 1632, 
she came with her four sons, John, Daniel, Stephen and Matthew, and after 
staying some five years in Saugus (now Lynn), they moved to Sandwich, on Cape 
Cod, and were among the first settlers of the cape. Indeed, it is claimed that 
Deborah gave the name of their home in England to the new settlement, 
Sandwich. So far as known, every Wing or Wing descendant of English descent 
now in America, who settled here prior to the Revolution, are descendents of 
the Rev. John and Deborah, and it is estimated that they numbered over thirty 
thousand. From both his father's and his mother's side of the family, Mr. 
Jordan inherits the best American traditions. He is fond of out-door life and 
has taken great interest in natural history, particularly flowers and birds 
native to this section. Largely as a source of amusement, he began a few years 
ago to collect at his home many species of wild native plants and to watch for 
the various birds which visited his garden. The result is he has a list and 
description of more than one hundred varieties of birds and an unusually large 
collection of indigenous plants. 

Additional Comments:
PAST AND PRESENT OF WILL COUNTY, ILLINOIS By W. W. Stevens President of the 
Will County Pioneers Association; Chicago: The S. J. Clarke Publishing 
Company, 1907

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