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Caption: Book - History of the University (Nevins)
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TURNER'S EARLY YEARS 13 industrial classes. But in the definite form it assumed in Illinois it was clearly responsible for the ultimate passage of the Land Grant Act. Its leader came from the zealous group of Eastern men at Illinois College. Jonathan Turner was born on a stony Massachusetts farm, of poor parentage, and educated at Yale, mainly by money earned at "working in gardens and sawing wood." In 1833 he went out to the three-year-old college then housed in one brick building a mile west of Jacksonville, a village of less than one thousand people, and here he remained for fifteen years, with the title of Professor of English Literature and Rhetoric, but actually teaching much besides.1 He was an even more indefatigable advocate of free public schools than President Beecher. His first summer vacation, for example, was spent in traveling through a half dozen counties on horseback at his own expense, delivering addresses in their advocacy wherever he could muster an audience. Hardships were frequent, and he once lay senseless on the prairie half a day after a heavy fall from his mount.:§He had studied the classics at Yale, but early tastes and the necessities of Western life gave him a strong predilection for the practical. "Agriculture*\ and "some branches of mechanic^'jj had been named by the founders of Illinois College as "part of the system of education whereby the health of the students will be promoted, and their expense diminished/' and the college had opened with a farm of a quarter-section, implements, and a carpenter's shop. From this he doubtless drew material for his first ideas § Life of Jonathan Baldwin Turner," by Mary Turner Carriel, pp. 12ff. Illinois College was founded by a group of Yale men, among them Jonathan's brother Asa, who in 1827 formed an association to promote " religion and learning " in the West. The faculty in 1833 consisted of five Yale men, aU under thirty. 1
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