NORMAL - If not for Jesse Fell's determination, the state's oldest public university and the town it later sprouted might never have become part of the fabric of McLean County.

"He was the central figure, he really engineered the process that brought Illinois State Normal University here," said ISU archivist Jo Ann Rayfield,

An entrepreneur and land speculator, Fell led the Bloomington-based group of investors who successfully won the 1857 bid to build the state's pilot foray into higher education.

Fell, a Quaker, was among the 19th century's Evangelical Movement - liberal Protestants pushing for universal education, temperance and the abolition of slavery, said John Freed, a retired ISU distinguished history professor.

Equal rights for blacks were important to Fell. In fact, he was integral in persuading the town to overwhelmingly vote for admitting a black student to the ISU lab school in 1867.

"He valued education as a way to improve society," said Rayfield, noting Fell professionally benefited from the winning bid, too.

Fell knew such an institution would draw jobs to the prairie, said Freed, who wrote the ISU sesquicentennial history: "Educating Illinois: Illinois State University 1857-2007." One of Fell's many properties sat around "the Junction" - where he'd convinced the Illinois Central Railroad and the Chicago and Alton Railroad to bring their lines.

The town of Normal grew from the Junction, which today exists where Constitution Trail crosses the tracks near the Amtrak Station.

The state granted ISU the right to build the university, first as a teacher-training institution or "normal" school, and later to transform it into broader offerings via federal funding. But hopes for the planned expansion were dashed in 1867, the victim of ugly politics, said Freed.

After the 1862 Morell Act establishing land-grant universities, Fell and other Bloomington-area leaders pledged about $470,000 to expand ISNU. "They already had the land, and area for a farm reserved," said Freed.

But Champaign-area lawmakers managed to win the bid with just $270,000, and according to newspaper accounts of the day, some under-the-table bribes and gifts. The end result? Urbana-Champaign became home to the University of Illinois.

That was the saddest disappointment in Fell's life, said Freed,

Instead, ISNU continued its teacher training track. It didn't begin awarding bachelor's degrees in teaching until 1907, said Freed. And it wasn't until 1966, when "Normal" was dropped from its title, that it expanded its bachelor degree offerings.

Fell has another claim to fame at ISU: He's known as the man who planted the campus.

Don Schmidt, an ISU horticulturalist, said trees were an integral part of the campus from the beginning. In 1995, the school officially named its quad the Fell Arboretum, in honor of the man who financed the planting of roughly 1,400 trees there.

"This prairie was the western wilderness to Fell," and he wanted trees to fill that space, said Schmidt.

Fell even joined the ISNU board of education for a few years - mainly to oversee the plantings, said Freed.