Edward Hand Pitkin (1846-1918) china company executive and college trustee; Lillie Morey Pitkin (1851-1924), suffragist and school board member.
Edward Pitkin married Lillie E. Morey and they settled in Oak Park in 1871. He became a founding trustee of the Scoville Institute, Oak Park's first public library. Soon after the Chicago Fire, he established a retail and manufacturing firm, Pitkin and Brooks, which sold pottery, lamps, and glassware, and manufactured diamond cut glass. The store, located at the corner of State and Lake Streets in Chicago, also offered "the most desirable goods in the largest variety, with the guarantee of satisfaction and courteous treatment," according to a 1906 advertisement.
When Dr. Edward Dwight Eaton, Pitkin's minister at the Fist Congregational Church in Oak Park, was appointed president of Beloit College, he asked for Pitkin's assistance in fund raising. This connection with Beloit College became a dominant feature in his life; as chairman of the Ways and Means committee, Pitkin increased the college's endowment tenfold, and he remained a college trusteee for thirty-two years. The Pitkins' daughter, Miss L. May Pitkin, taught English and served as Dean of Women at Beloit.
In 1893, Lillie Pitkin becamse the first elected woman official in Oak Park. Illinois women had been given the right to vote in local school board elections in 1891. Mrs. Pitkin, a member of The Nineteenth Cenury Woman's Club, was nominated and elected to serve a six-year term on the Oak Park High School Board. In an ironic twist years later, the Pitkin home was torn down to make way for the high school's athletic field.