Background
Jonathan Baldwin Turner was born on December 7, 1805 in Templeton, Massachussets. He was the son of Asa and Abigail (Baldwin) Turner, and a brother of Asa Turner.
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Jonathan Baldwin Turner was born on December 7, 1805 in Templeton, Massachussets. He was the son of Asa and Abigail (Baldwin) Turner, and a brother of Asa Turner.
He obtained his early education in local district schools, in which he later became a teacher.
When his brother Asa graduated from college in 1827, he persuaded his father to let Jonathan go to New Haven to prepare for Yale, and at the end of two years he was admitted to the college. Early in the spring of his senior year a call came to Yale from Illinois College, at Jacksonville, for an instructor in Latin and Greek. The president of Yale recommended Turner and offered to excuse him from final examinations and to forward his diploma if he would accept.
In May 1833 he became a member of the Illinois faculty. The following year he was appointed professor of rhetoric and belles-lettres.
He early became a leader in the movement for public schools in Illinois, lecturing in its behalf throughout the central part of the state. One of the organizers of the Illinois State Teachers' Association in 1836, he enlisted the aid of teachers and parents in his campaign.
He was successful as an instructor, but in 1843-44 he edited the Statesman, a local paper, and by his vigorous condemnation of slavery alienated the Southern students in the college and the slavery advocates in Jacksonville.
In 1847 he resigned his professorship because of ill health and disagreement with the college officials over slavery and denominational questions. He now devoted himself primarily to his gardens and orchards, which he had been developing since 1834, and to agricultural experiments. He made the Osage orange popular for farm hedges, and invented various implements for planting and cultivating crops. The preservation of game life and of national resources also engaged his attention.
When the Illinois State Natural History Society was organized, June 30, 1858, he was elected president.
In spite of these activities he found time to further various educational projects. The free school law of 1855 was largely the result of his untiring efforts, and his influence had much to do with the establishment of the first normal school in Illinois in 1857.
His most notable contribution to education, however, was in connection with the campaign for land grant colleges. At a county institute of teachers held at Griggsville, May 13, 1850, he presented a plan for a state university for the industrial classes in each of the states of the Union. This he presented, also, to a convention of farmers which convened in Granville on Nov. 18, 1851.
The plan was approved by this convention, which also adopted certain resolutions including one which pledged the members to "take immediate steps for the establishment of a university in the State of Illinois. " These resolutions and Turner's plan were printed and widely circulated. Other conventions were held later, and at one which met at Springfield, Jan. 4, 1853, a petition was drawn up requesting the legislature to ask Congress to appropriate lands to each state for the establishment of industrial universities. Such a request, the first probably from any state, was made by the Illinois legislature in 1853 (Journal of the House of Representatives of . Illinois, 1853).
Through the Industrial League, organized to carry on propaganda in behalf of industrial education, of which he became principal director, Turner gave time and strength to the movement for years.
Meanwhile, it was gathering strength in other parts of the country, and in 1857 Justin Morrill, then a representative from Vermont, introduced a bill in Congress providing that public lands be donated to the states and territories to provide colleges of agriculture and the mechanic arts. This failed to pass over a presidential veto, but a similar bill became a law in 1862.
Shortly after its passage, the small colleges of Illinois united to secure the advantages of the land grant, but chiefly through Turner's activities the legislature of 1867 decided to establish "a single new industrial university" (now the University of Illinois), which was located at Urbana, Champaign County.
After the university was incorporated, Feb. 28, 1867, he devoted the remainder of his life to a study of the Bible and its teachings. His published works included Mormonism in All Ages (1842); The Three Great Races of Men (1861); Universal Law and Its Opposites (1892); and The Christ Word Versus the Church Word (1895). He died in Jacksonville, Ill.
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He was a dedicated Christian.
He was the president of the Illinois State Natural History Society.
He returned to the East in 1835 to marry, on October 22, Rhodolphia S. Kibbe of Somers, Connecticut. He was survived by four of his seven children.