Published March 21, 2024
By Reg Ankrom
Orville Hickman Browning, Whig senator from Adams County, in the spring of 1837 had
just finished a frustrating session of the Illinois General Assembly. He had opposed the statewide
frenzy for public works to fund bridges, canals, railroads, wagon roads, and river and harbor
improvements in Illinois.
Abraham Lincoln’s nine-member Sangamon legislative delegation—the legislature’s
largest—advocated for public works. They traded their votes with those of other legislators, who
lusted for public works, to relocate the state capital from Vandalia to their city of Springfield.
Most legislators of the Tenth General Assembly in 1836 and 1837 were only too happy to give
their vote for Springfield in exchange for internal improvements for which their constituents
clamored. Surely, they believed improvements in public works would boost their local economy
and the state’s.
Browning thought the largesse would bankrupt the state. It almost did. When at the end
of the fiscal year the first bill for $123,571.52 due on obligations the state had floated for internal
improvement projects, Levi Davis, the state’s auditor of Public Accounts, reported that annual
revenue of the state totaled about $67,500. And the state treasury at that moment contained only
$92.15. Davis urged legislators to increase revenues through new taxes to pay the bills. In the
days that followed, legislators not only ignored him. They proposed another $800,000 in
additional projects.
While Browning was disappointed by his spendthrift colleagues, he returned to a more
pleasant interest that had occupied his mind from his earliest days in the legislature. He was a
leading proponent of public education in Illinois. And while known for that work, a particular
focus of the Adams County senator has largely gone unnoticed, partly because of his own
modesty. It was Browning who conceived of a state school for the deaf in Illinois.
In 1833 he was elected to an office in the Illinois Institute on Education, an organization
whose purpose was to influence state government to fund education for Illinois children.
Governor Joseph Duncan, a Jacksonville resident, in a message to the legislature on December 9,
1836, advocated a public school system. Browning told his legislative colleagues that education
was required “to sustain our democratic republican institutions.”
Duncan’s attack on President Andrew Jackson derailed any interest the Democratically
controlled General Assembly might otherwise have had for his recommendations. Browning,
however, used the occasion to involve himself in education issues before the legislature. Over the
next three years, he served on Senate committees on seminaries, school lands, and education.
Browning’s signal achievement in education was his success in establishing the Illinois
School for the Deaf in Jacksonville in 1839, the first charitable institution in Illinois. His interest
in deaf education had been aroused during a casual meeting on a Mississippi River steamboat in
1838 with an educated deaf man from Kentucky. Seeing that the deaf man had been taught to be
a self-supporting citizen, Browning began an extensive study of deafness, and became the first
leader in Illinois to commit to public policy to educate the deaf.
He led the movement to establish an Illinois Asylum for the Education of the Deaf and
Dumb, as his bill referred to it. Section 3, in the words of one analyst, indicated Browning’s
belief that deaf children, “as lovely and interesting as any others” need not grow into adults with
“only the infant mind, manly passions, and brute strength.”
The Browning bill defined the nature of the work a deaf school would do: “The object of
said corporation shall be to promote by all proper and possible means, the intellectual, moral, and
physical culture of that unfortunate portion of the community, who, by the mysterious
dispensation of Providence, have been born, or by disease become deaf, and, of course, dumb;
and by a judicious and well adopted course of education, to reclaim them from their lonely and
cheerless condition, restore them to the rank of their species, and fit them for the discharge of
the social and domestic duties of life.”
The Senate unanimously passed Browning’s bill, and the House approved it by a large
majority. On February 23, 1839, Governor Thomas Carlin, who had been registrar of the federal
land office in Browning’s hometown of Quincy, signed Browning’s bill to create the School for
the Deaf. Jacksonville was chosen as the site for the new school, largely because of its central
location in the state and the recognition of the community as an educational center. Illinois
College had been founded there in 1829 and the state’s first Female Academy founded there in
1835.
Browning himself recruited the school’s first board of trustees. Their status indicated the
importance Browning assigned to the job. Among the members were Governors Carlin and
Duncan; Supreme Court Justices Samuel Drake Lockwood of Jacksonville, Samuel Treat, and
Cyrus Walker; Illinois College President Julian Monson Sturtevant; Porter Clay of Jacksonville,
brother of U.S. Senator Henry Clay; and several other men of distinction. A superintendent of the
School for the Deaf who sketched the school’s history, wrote that Browning, “with characteristic
modesty, omitted his own name from the original list, and the real founder of the institution was
never officially connected with it.” Browning maintained an interest in the school throughout his
life.
The financial distress left by the Internal Improvements debacle and national economic
Panic of 1837 delayed construction for seven years. Building began in 1842 and the school
opened in its first three-story brick building on January 26, 1846. Room and board, instruction,
and medical care were provided free of charge to deaf children of Illinois.
Browning’s promotion of a state-sponsored institution and his influence to situate it in
Jacksonville was the beginning of a new period of enlightenment there. The city’s leaders
worked to attract other public institutions to care for the insane and blind. The School for the
Insane opened in Jacksonville on March 1, 1847, the School for the Blind on January 13, 1849,
and the School for Feeble-Minded Children on February 15, 1865.
Sources
Baxter, Maurice, Orville H. Browning, Lincoln’s Friend and Critic. (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1957), 11.
Blue Book of the State of Illinois, 1927-1928. (Springfield: State of Illinois, 1929), 404.
Brief History of the Charitable Institutions of the State of Illinois. (Chicago: John Morris Co.,
1893), 10.
Gordon, J.C. “The Illinois Institution for the Education of the Deaf,” School News and
Practical Educator, June 1898, 290.
Heinl, Frank J. “Jacksonville and Morgan County: A Historical Review,” Journal of the Illinois
State Historical Society 18, No. 1. (Springfield: ISHS, 1925), 22.
Historical Encyclopedia of Illinois, 1. Newton Bateman, Paul Selby, eds. (Chicago: Munsell
Publishing Co., 1903), 187.
Mather, Irwin F. The Making of Illinois: Historical Sketches. (Chicago: A. Flanagan, Publisher,
1900), 225.
Moses, John. Illinois and Historical. (Chicago: Fergus Printing Co., 1892), 1015.
Reports Made to the Seante and the House of Representatives of the State of Illinois at their
Session Begun and Held in Vandalia, December 4, 1833. (Vandalia: William Walters, Public Printer)
