Proceedings of the Grand Lodge of Illinois - University Library

472 JOURNAL OF PROCEEDINGS I913
A RIPENED SHEAF GARNERED
Samuel Willard was born in Lunenburgh, Vermont, Dec. 30, 1821.
The first of his ancestors to emigrate to this country was Major Simon
Willard from the county of Kent, England, about 1630. As a civil
engineer he laid out the town of Concord, Mass.
His second son, from whom Bro. Willard is descended, was one
of the leading clergymen of New England in his day, was President,
for a time, of Harvard College, and pastor of the "Old South Church,"
of Boston, at the time of his death.
Of Bro. Willard's ancestors, six were clergymen, three army
officers, two were medical doctors, and two were professors. When
Samuel was about nine years old, his father and family left Boston
and started for the great west. After enduring many hardships, the
pioneers settled in the little town of Carrollton, 111. Two years after,
the place was stricken with the cholera. Of the family of seven, four
died, leaving the father, mother, and Samuel, who wasi studiously preparing
to enter college at Alton. At that time the requirements and
curriculum of Shurtleff College were the same as that of Yale.
His father, Julius A. Willard, moved his home to Jacksonville
about 1840, where young Samuel entered Illinois College, from which
he was graduated in 1845. Dr. Edward Beecher, of the famous Beecher
1 family, was president. Among his classmates were Judge Morton, of
the Supreme Court of Kansas, Dr. Newton Bateman, president of
Knox College, E. W. Blatchford, of Chicago, and Rev. Thomas K.
Beecher, a preacher of little less fame than that of his celebrated
brother, Henry Ward Beecher.
While at Alton, Samuel Willard often met and listened to the
Lovejoy Brothers. Elijah P., editor of the Observer, was one of the
first martyrs in Illinois among the abolitionists. Owen, by his forceful
oratory, became one of the leading causes of our Civil War. The
home of the Willards was one of the stations of the underground
railroad, between slavery in the United States' and freedom in the
British Dominions. The Willards both were earnest and zealous in
the abolition cause. While Samuel was yet in college, they were both
arrested for assisting a young woman named Lucy, a slave without a
surname. She had escaped from her mistress in St. Louis. To test
the fugitive slave law in Illinois, they carried their cause to the
supreme court, lost and were fined. The poor girl was returned to
slavery.