The news last month about the sale of BUNN brings to mind stories about the Bunn family’s influence on Springfield’s development, dating back to since Abraham Lincoln lived here. It is only coincidental that 100 years ago, in 1926, four children of Jacob Bunn Sr. followed what he believed to be a moral obligation to send thousands of dollars to nearly 5,000 people they had no legal obligation to repay.
This story has such an incredible twist it could be a case study in a leadership book.
In the 1840s, banking was not regulated as it is today. Jacob Bunn Sr. opened his private J. Bunn Bank at Fifth and Adams streets to help businesspeople with credit, loans and deposits. But by 1878, following the Panic of 1873, the bank had debts of $800,000 and only $572,000 in available cash. The bank voluntarily liquidated.
Bunn could return only 71.5 cents on the dollar to his 1,400 depositors, and that satisfied his legal obligation to them. But he felt a moral obligation to repay the remainder and spent the next two decades hoping to fully repay all customers or their descendants. He did not get it done before he died in 1897, and a family document says he was “doomed to disappointment.”
His four children knew of his wishes and did not let the matter drop. Bunn’s children – Alice Bunn, George W. Bunn, Henry Bunn and Jacob Bunn, Jr. – eventually formed the Bunn Memorial Trust, with B.L. Catron as their attorney. They shouldered their father’s commitment to make full repayment, a process that became more complicated as the years went on.
By 1925, only about 10% of the original depositors were still alive. Catron and his assistants located as many of them as they could. They also painstakingly scoured obituaries and wills in mortuary and court records in an attempt to decipher the depositors’ beneficiaries.
The family kept their plans quiet and private. Nearly 48 years after the bank closed, Catron issued a statement on Dec. 27, 1925, that surprised the Springfield community. He told the Illinois State Register that the day before, checks totaling $200,000 had been mailed by the Bunn Memorial Trust to 325 depositors or their heirs. He explained why: Bunn’s children “were in complete sympathy” with their father’s wishes. The amount of those checks covered not only the remaining 28.5 cents on the dollar, but also 5% interest per year for 50 years, which Catron calculated as 240% simple interest for every depositor. Those initial checks ranged from 62 cents to $9,000. Recipients had no clue the money was coming.
But there was more work to be done before sending more checks. Catron found an average of 3.5 heirs for each of the 1,400 depositors, which meant a total of nearly 5,000 unsuspecting people would receive checks. The trust said it would move quickly to pay everyone “as soon as the great tangle of details in tracing many of the heirs through the third and fourth generations has been unraveled,” according to an Illinois State Register article. Managing editor Vincent Young “V. Y.” Dallman described the initial checks as an astonishing Christmas gift for hundreds of unsuspecting people.
Catron also estimated the total amount to be repaid by the family at between $800,000 and $1 million. The process moved into the early months of 1926 as they resolved confusion and drafted thousands more checks for the heirs – the brother and sister of a deceased child who had a $23 savings account, for example, and a group of five heirs who shared $5,600.
Dallman, who also used the newspaper to successfully lead a crusade for Springfield to establish its own electric utility, quotes an unnamed businessman who called the Bunns’ repayment “the finest thing ever done in Springfield.”
The Bunns initially wanted no publicity for their generosity, but they couldn’t avoid it given the buzz their big-heartedness created. They relented and allowed Catron to issue a statement and talk to the Springfield newspaper. The story spread nationwide, including the front page of the Washington Post. But they never revealed the names of people receiving the checks.
“It was a singular gesture that gave the family an almost Lincolnesque reputation for honesty,” John Hoffman wrote in the summer 2003 edition of the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, according to the Sangamon County Historical Society. “The Bunns were such a prominent and respected family in Springfield that the press across the country reported the story as an act of noblesse oblige.”
Ed Wojcicki has degrees in journalism and political studies and worked for print publications for 26 years. He freelances from Springfield.
This article appears in April 2-8, 2026.
