Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: opened by his own individual enterprise for the satisfaction of inborn interests. EARLY LIFE. Powell, the fourth of nine children, was born of English parents at Mount Morris, in the Genesee Valley of western New York, on March 24, 1834. His father, Joseph Powell, a Methodist preacher, and his mother, Mary Dean Powell, had come to the United States a short time before. The family moved from New York to Jackson, Ohio, in 1838-1839, to South Grove, Wisconsin, in 1846, and eventually to Illinois, settling first at Bonus Prairie in 1851, and later at Wheaton in 1854; thus in Illinois Powell lived from his seventeenth to his twenty-seventh year. While he was still a boy in Ohio he had experience of anti- slavery agitation. His father was a staunch abolitionist, who did not conceal his opinions, and as a result the son was so unfairly treated by his mates in the village school that he was removed from it and for a time put under the care of a well- to-do elderly neighbor named Crookham, who taught gratuitously and irregularly in a log-house school and laboratory, as well as in the field. It was thus that young Powell made a beginning in scientific study and observation. When the move was made from Ohio, all the household goods were transported in a wagon and two carriages, one of the latter being driven by young John to Wisconsin. There the boy, when his father was away from home preaching, had the duty of conducting the farm, from which the family derived its principal support, and of hauling farm produce to markets, five or six days to a trip and twelve or more trips in a year; but his heart was in his studies, and in the winter of 1850 he went to Janesville, twenty miles from home, to attend school, working for his keep on a near-by farm. In 1852 he began school teaching,…
