James Dellet

He was born on February 18, 1788, in Camden, New Jersey. He moved to Columbia, South Carolina, with his parents in 1800. In 1810, he graduated from the University of South Carolina in Columbia. He studied law, was admitted to the bar in 1813, and practiced. He moved to the Alabama Territory in 1818, settling in Claiborne, and continued the practice of law. He worked with William B. Travis of Alamo fame.

In 1819, he was elected to the first Alabama House of Representatives under state government. He served as its secretary, and he was re-elected in both 1821 and 1825.

In the 1830s, he partnered with Lyman Gibbons, who married Dellet's daughter Emma, and who went on to serve on the Alabama Supreme Court.[1]

He was an unsuccessful Whig candidate for Congress in 1833, but he was later elected as a Whig to the Twenty-sixth Congress. He served from March 4, 1839, to March 3, 1841, and from March 4, 1843, to March 3, 1845, after he was again elected to the Twenty-eighth Congress. He resumed the practice of law and engaged in agricultural pursuits.

He died on December 21, 1848, in Claiborne, Alabama, in Monroe County. He was interred in a private cemetery on his Dellet Park plantation at Claiborne.