Jacob Baker was born in Wilkes Barre, Luzerne county, Pennsylvania, October 6, 1796, and at the age of one year went to New York State with his parents, where he remained until after he was twenty-one years of age. On the of 12th of October, 1817, he married Elizabeth Wilbur, and in the same month moved to Farmington, Trumbull county, Ohio, where he lived, with the exception of a few years in Portage county, Ohio, until 1839. In 1818 he joined the Methodist church in Portage county, Ohio, and in 1823 was given a license as an exhorter. In 1830 he was elected to the position of Circuit Steward, and held it until he moved to Illinois. In 1828 he was elected Justice of the Peace. Mr. Baker has been a strong advocate of the temperance cause since 1830, when he became a member of the old Washington Society. In 1834 he joined an Abolitionist Society, when to be an Abolitionist meant persecution. His last political act in Ohio was to serve as a delegate to an Anti-Slavery Convention at Youngstown, in Trumbull county, to nominate a candidate for the Legislature.

He left Ohio on the 18th of September, 1839 with teams, and his family consisting of thirteen persons, and arrived at Fulton, Whiteside county, October 12, 1839. There he bought a lot, and an unfinished frame house, finished the house and resided in it until 1842, when he purchased a claim in Ustick, from which he soon removed to Union Grove He formed the first Sabbath School in the county at his residence in Fulton in the fall of 1840. He was also a local preacher in the early times in Whiteside, preaching at different places in the county, and at Lyons, Iowa, He brought his radical abolition sentiments with him when he came to Whiteside, and took an earnest and active part in the Anti-Slavery movement which first began to be agitated in the West in the fall of 1840, when James G. Birney was the candidate of that party for President, and cast his vote for that gentleman, who received in this State only 159 votes. The great Anti-Slavery champion, Elijah P. Lovejoy, used to run slaves to Mr. Baker, on the "underground railroad," on their way to freedom. In the latter part of 1844 he withdrew from the M. E. Church because his views on the Slavery question were objected to, and on the 19th of January, 1845, called a meeting at the school house, in Union Grove, to organize a church that would sustain the Anti-Slavery movement.

At that meeting Jacob Baker, Elizabeth Baker, Daniel B. Young, Betsey Young, Abigail Young, Henry Boyer, Sylvia Graves, and Olive Upson, were present and formed a Wesleyan church, the first in the county. Soon after others joined, and the number increased weekly. Rev. Chas. Drake was secured as pastor the next spring. For the lack of accommodations it was decided to build a church, which was done through the efforts of Mr. Baker and Daniel B. Young. The building was frame, 32 by 36 feet and stood on Mr. Baker’s farm near Unionville, on the Morrison and Fulton road. It was taken down a few years since. In the fall of 1848 Mr. Baker was one of the delegates from Illinois to the General Conference of the Wesleyan church, held in the city of New York, and in the fall of 1868 a delegate to the General Conference of the same Church, held at Cleveland, Ohio. In 1852 he was a candidate of the Anti-Slavery party for Representative to the Legislature from the district of which Whiteside then formed a part, and received 47 votes, polling more than the party vote. On the 8th of April, 1863, he sold his farm in Union Grove, and moved to Morrison, and in the spring and summer of 1865, in connection with E. L. Worthington and Robert Paley, built the Revere House in that city.

Since then he has lived a retired life at his residence in Morrison. Mr. Baker’s first wife died on the 14th of May, 1874, at the age of ‘78 years. Mr. and Mrs. Baker had lived together as husband and wife for fifty-eight years, and raised a family of eleven children all of whom grew up to man and womanhood. On the 6th of May, 1875, Mr. Baker married Mrs. Phoebe Wilbur, his present wife, at Hammond Station, Michigan. The names of his children are in order as follows: William R., died May 14, 1859; Sylvia M., wife of J. W. Battis, and living in Morrison; Oliver, living in Morrison; Benoni, died February 15, 1844; Lydia wife of Henry C. Fellows, and living in Fulton; Reuben, living in Kansas, and Presiding Bishop of the Protestant Methodist Church in that State; Billings P., living in Ustick; Isaac W., died September 28, 1853; Dillon P., living in Sycamore, Illinois, and is publisher of a newspaper called the Free Methodist and minister also of the Free Methodist Church; Hester Ann, died December 13, 1865, and Martha J., died November 22, 1872.

History of Whiteside County IL - Bent - Wilson / 1877