A pair of benches that now grace Illinois College’s campus are rooted in more than 150 years of history.

The benches are made from remnants of the Turner Titan tree, an Osage orange tree that Jonathan Baldwin Turner 1860 planted on his Evergreen Farm near Butler around the time of the Civil War.

The tree survived everything thrown at it over the years, even outlasting the farmhouse it was intended to shade, until a December 2018 tornado took it down.

Turner’s family still owned the farm and, because of Turner’s connection to Illinois College, agreed to let Illinois College have some of the wood.

“We wanted to make something commemorating Turner and this history,” said Guy Sternberg, Illinois College adjunct faculty member and co-director of the college’s Starhill Forest Arboretum in Petersburg. “The biggest pieces we could find that weren’t all twisted up and broken, we thought we could have benches made.”

To understand all of that history, one should start at the beginning.

Turner was a professor at Illinois College in the mid-1800s who had the idea — some 30 years before the invention of barbed wire — that the school could use a fence of some sort around campus, Sternberg said.

“He was the one back in 1840, 1842, that said we needed something to keep the cattle out,” Sternberg said. “He came up with the idea to do something like they did in England, which had all of these hedgerows made of thorny hawthorn.”

With some research, Turner decided the Osage orange, which is “very thorny,” Sternberg said, would work nicely.

“He got some seeds from Texas and started to play with them on his own farm down in Butler,” Sternberg said. “They perfected the ways of growing them, came up with the techniques” for developing them into hedgerows.

At one point, Turner had 10 acres of his farm planted in Osage orange as he researched the best ways to plant them and tend to them — from spacing to pruning — to create an effective hedgerow, Sternberg said.