NATIONAL ACADEMY BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS VOL. VIII 



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 gratui- 

 tously and irregularly in a log-house school and laboratory, as 

 well as in the field. It was thus that young Powell made a be- 

 ginning 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, with half his pupils older 

 than himself; and for the following nine years he alternately 

 taught, studied, and traveled. He had the good fortune at the 

 outset of this laborious period to fall in with intelligent school 

 officials, but much of his teaching was done under narrowing 

 conditions of isolation and privation. His college studies were 



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