SangamonLink: James N. Brown founded Illinois State Fair

James N. Brown helped create the Republican Party in Illinois. He bred famous shorthorn cattle on a showplace farm that stretched across Sangamon and Morgan counties. He was the second person (behind Cyrus McCormick, but ahead of Jonathan Baldwin Turner and Philip Armour) named to the Illinois Farmers Hall of Fame.

And he founded the Illinois State Fair.

Brown moved with his family from Kentucky to central Illinois in 1834 and bought 3,000 acres of prairie in the Island Grove area.

“(T)he most enduring basis of his fame … will be found to rest upon the fact that he was the first to recognize that the best way to get the most profit out of good grass and good corn without robbing the land of its fertility was to stock it with good cattle,” said Alvin H. Sanders, publisher of The Breeders Gazette, at the 1911 ceremony where Brown was inducted into the Illinois Farmers Hall of Fame.

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“When he departed this life, in 1868, he left behind not a run-down, worn-out, ready-to-be-abandoned farm … but instead he bequeathed the three thousand acres of blue grass pasture known as Grove Park, tenanted by well-bred animals, with every acre richer than when it came into his possession.”

As a member of the Illinois House of Representatives in 1853, Brown – known as “Captain” Brown because as a young man he commanded a unit of Kentucky militia – introduced the bill that created the state Board of Agriculture. He was elected its first president, and the legislature set aside $1,000 each for state fairs in 1853 and 1854.

Brown had recognized the need for a state fair to promote and improve Illinois agriculture “from his earliest residence in Illinois,” 1911 state fair president John Crebs said at the induction ceremony

Brown organized the first fair, held Oct. 11-14, 1853, in a 20-acre field on the west side of Springfield. (Brown also was one of the exhibitors; his cattle won six prizes.) Crebs’ comment:

“Thus was the exposition now known as the Great Illinois State Fair started in a small field enclosed with a rail fence, under the able and popular leadership of Captain James N. Brown. … No man could wish for a more flattering testimonial than the remarkable record for usefulness made by the Illinois State Fair.”

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Brown was elected to the Illinois House in 1840, 1842, 1846 and 1852. He was described as an “Old Line Whig,” in agreement with Abraham Lincoln. At the Hall of Fame ceremony, Springfield attorney Clinton Conkling discussed Brown’s conversion to the Republican Party during a Whig meeting in Springfield in 1857.

“When called on to state his position, Captain Brown said, ‘My friends, I have been a Whig all my life. I cannot be a Democrat. From this time on I am a Lincoln Republican.’ And such he remained until the day of his death.”

Brown was buried wearing the honorary pallbearer’s sash he wore at Lincoln’s funeral. His grave is in Woodwreath Cemetery on Old Jacksonville Road west of Berlin. Island Grove Methodist Church, which Brown helped found and where he was Sunday School superintendent for 30 years, is in the middle of the cemetery. The Brown home itself was destroyed by fire in the 1940s.

Excerpted from SangamonLink.org, online encyclopedia of the Sangamon County Historical Society.

This article originally appeared on State Journal-Register: Sangamon County farmer founded Illinois State Fair