An Age of Improvement: The Founding of Illinois Wesleyan University

Founded in 1822, the settlement of Bloomington, Illinois - then known as Blooming Grove - attracted settlers moving west in search of affordable land. Blooming Grove's fertile soils brought farmers, which necessitated the town's development to include merchants, lawyers, doctors, and soon educators. Education came to the area first in the form of a log-cabin school in 1825 and later grew to include academies and schools for girls. By the late 1840s, community members, led by newspaper editor Charles Merriman, began to support the idea of forming a college. John S. Barger, a Methodist minister and the principal founder of Illinois Wesleyan University, began to promote the founding of a college in Bloomington at the Methodist Illinois Conference meetings in 1849 in hopes of gaining the patronage of the church. That plan ultimately worked and on September 23, 1850, after months of meetings of community members and church representatives, a group of 30 men signed a declaration of intent to form Illinois University. However, when filed with the courthouse on December 3, 1850, the document indicated a change in the name of the college with the insertion of the word "Wesleyan", indicating the institution's affiliation with the Methodist church despite earlier community efforts for a non-sectarian place of learning.

The slideshow below features photographs of some of the individuals involved in the founding of Illinois Wesleyan University. We do not have photographs for all 30 founding members of the Board of Trustees. For a full list of names, see the 1851 Circular exhibit object.