Career
He was a Democrat.
Turner, born in Vermont, was an American soldier in the War of 1812. Within the next three weeks, they had settleed upon 320 acres of raw land, three miles west of Prairieville (now Waukesha), Wisconsin Territory where they built a log cabin and lived for two years, until a frame house could be built. Theirs was one of the three settlers" houses on the trail between their cabin and Aztalan on the Rock River, some thirty miles away.
He represented his county on the "Legislative Council" (equivalent to a state senate) in all three sessions of the fifth and final Wisconsin Territory Legislative Assembly in 1847-1848.
He was succeeded the next year by fellow Democrat Frederick Sprague. Their daughter Amanda Anna Louisa Turner married Harrison Reed, then editor of the Milwaukee Sentinel, who would (after her 1862 death) later become Governor of Florida.
He died at his home in Menasha on the 1st of February, 1874. Mary survived him, and died in Berlin, Wisconsin on August 1, 1884.
There are unsourced claims on some websites that Joseph was the brother of Peter H. Turner, who also came to Wisconsin in 1840.
