Alson Streeter was born on January 18, 1823 in Rensselaer County, New York to Eleanor Kenyon and Roswell Streeter. The family later moved to Allegany County, New York in 1827 and Lee County, Illinois in 1836. He lived with his parents until his father's death in 1840, after which he became a miner and farmer. He attended Knox College in Illinois in 1846 and graduated in 1849.
Career
In 1849, he moved to California, but returned to Illinois in 1851. In 1853 and 1854, he returned to California for a short time to drive cattle. During the Civil war, he supported the War Democrat faction of the Democratic Party. In the 1860s, he entered politics as an unsuccessful candidate for Illinois General Assembly. In 1862, he joined the Mercer County Board of Supervisors. Streeter was elected as a Democratic member of the Illinois House of Representatives for the 1873–1874 session from Mercer County. In 1874, he became a member of the recently-founded Greenback Party. In 1878, he was the Greenback nominee for Congress for Illinois's 10th congressional district, and was the party's nominee for Governor of Illinois in 1880, coming in third with over 28,000 votes. In 1884, he was elected under a Greenback-Democratic fusion ticket to the Illinois State Senate and served until 1888. In 1891, he was narrowly defeated by former Governor John M. Palmer for Illinois' seat in the United States Senate by eleven votes. In 1884, he served as the temporary chairman of the recently founded Anti-Monopoly Party. In the 1888 presidential election, he won the Union Labor Party's nomination by acclamation on the first ballot, with Charles E. Cunningham as his running mate. Streeter and Cunningham finished fourth in a field of six in the election, garnering 149,115 votes or 1.31 percent of the nationwide total.
Personal life
He was married twice, to Deborah Boone Streeter and Susan Menold Streeter. Streeter had three sons and four daughters. On November 24, 1901 Streeter died at his home in New Windsor, Illinois from diabetes and was interred in New Windsor Cemetery in Mercer County, Illinois.
