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Caption: Book - History of the University (Powell)
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128 History University of Illinois CHAPTER VI THE MEN WHO LED JONATHAN BALDWIN TURNER At the age of forty-three in the year 1848, Jonathan Baldwin Turner had proved himself eminently successful as a human being. Het was broken in health; he had just resigned his position as professor of literature and belles-lettres in Illinois college because he could not keep his distasteful views to himself; he was poor, wretchedly, pinchingly poor with a wife and five small children dependent upon him. Yet in spite of these apparent evidences of failure, Turner had built for himself enduring1 foundations for his later success as a pioneer in educational reform. He was fearless, bold, free; and he knew the educational needs of his state as few men could know them. His path to financial safety was literally a thorny one: it was the path of the red raspberry and the osage orange. The Turner red raspberry is still the standard for this climate; the osage was his answer to the question which involved the success of the state: "What shall we do for fences?" Without fences Illinois was destined to be, not a region of home-farms, but of great plantations or estates. And Illinois could not buy fences in that day; she had to raise them and they must be "horse-high, bull-strong, and pig-tight." The problem demanded the man. Variety after variety of soilproduced fencing Turner made the subject of his experiment only to discard each and all. Finally he found a hardy thorny native of Arkansas and Texas, the osage orange. Exultantly he said of the osage, "One good gate, well locked, makes the whole farm secure against all intruders." Then came the civil war. The osage must be brought from Arkansas by a northerner as no southerner could be brought into business relations with the north. Turner was sure he had solved this problem when he induced an agent to venture into Arkansas for the seed. But when this agent beheld, hanging from trees the
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