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Leonard Jackson Powell

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Written by Monte Remer, Class of 2026

At the age of fifteen, Leonard Jackson Powell left to work in the California gold mines. He parted with his family’s newly-tilled homestead outside of Portland, Oregon and his grieving father. The family had already traveled half a year from Missouri, trudging across “the then trackless desert”1 and arriving in the Willamette Valley “weary and worn.” Powell’s mother died after only a few months in their new home. The promise he’d made to her on her deathbed would prove to be the hinge point of his life, and it was the ore material from which his mind carved out his life’s plan in California. The child returned at sixteen with a thousand dollars (a little over $42,000 in 2025)2 which he placed into his father’s hand. For his mother, he returned with the intent to keep his promise to her: to educate himself. “L.J” or “Cube Root” Powell went on to become a Willamette professor, brief Willamette president, soldier, reverend, and champion of free education.

Portrait of Leonard Jackson Powell (University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections)

Powell was born May 19th, 1834 to David and Almedia Hurless Powell near Piketon, Kentucky. In 1837, the family settled in Cass County, Missouri, which was at that time the edge of the country’s western colonial frontier. Migration and hardship were normal for the child. His father tanned leather to make Leonard’s shoes, and his mother carded, spun, and wove the wool to make his clothes.3

Ten years passed and the colonial frontier had extended to the far western coast. Oregon represented new economic opportunities and a bountiful environment for settlements. In 1847, the Powells set out to make it their new home. They arrived in the Willamette Valley in late autumn of 1848. Almedia died in the following spring. Leonard had already made one promise to his mother, “never to taste intoxicating liquors,” but in dying she asked something more serious of her son, that he “procure an education, and do all the good he could in the world.” The men who the boy met in the California mines effectively told him to listen to his mother. Educated men themselves, they stressed the importance and power of a degree. Powell returned from the mines unable to read or write, something he immediately set about remedying.4 At seventeen he entered the Portland Academy to prepare for university. Literacy alone was far from the limit of his ambitions.

He briefly served in military conflicts before dedicating himself fully to education as the great commitment of his life. During the Rogue River War of 1855-1856 he served as a private with the Oregon Mounted Volunteers, then as a first lieutenant with the Multnomah County Rangers, affiliating with Lieutenant Phil Sheridan in response to the Cascades Massacre. He then attended Ohio Wesleyan University, graduating in 1861. He returned to Oregon soon after, and the rest of his life immediately fell into place. In the fall of that year, he married his wife, Martha Ransom, and was elected as Professor at Willamette University. He was twenty seven years old.

THE YOUNG PROFESSOR

Powell’s adventurous early years made him an instant campus character and student favorite. He was easygoing, irreverent, passionate, and erratic. Accounts of his fourteen years as a Willamette Professor and brief stint as interim president portray a chaotic mix of disagreements with the Board of Trustees, an unconventional approach to student discipline, and plenty of conflict in local politics.

From 1862 to 1876, Powell was a prominent presence on Willamette’s campus. Descriptions of his physical appearance read like cryptid encounters: “The Professor Powell was a big man, both physically and mentally, with a head which appeared even larger than is usual for a man of his proportions.” He was “a man of medium height, but of large, compact and powerful frame, immense vital powers supply unlimited energy to his mind, and enable him to do most manly work in a most manly way.”5

His fourteen-year tenure was an exceptionally long time for an era when faculty frequently moved between western institutions.6 During that time, he taught mathematics and natural sciences. The volatility in the natural science of chemistry matched his personality. A student of Powell’s, John Grubbs, recounts in his diary entry of March 31st, 1863 that he was nearly expelled for exploding some form of powder on Powell’s classroom floor.7 Fortunately for Grubbs, the professor’s temper was as transitory as his childhood and Grubbs “soon got him into a good humor.”

One student describes Powell as “somewhat impulsive and easily ruffled.” Another student writes that he was “rather easy going.”8 A few students might have taken the unpredictable temperament of the young professor as uncertainty in his position. Another student’s diary from May 8th, 1863 alludes to some scheme, “The boys took some initiatory steps for the removal of Mr. Powell.”9 These boys had to recite a lesson before Mr. Powell the following day. Students were not entirely incorrect in their assessment of some shaky ground, though. He navigated growing pains as a professor. When he tried to be a disciplinarian rather than be easygoing, Willamette’s Board of Trustees said that he should have done the reverse. After dismissing a student from his department for a misdemeanor, then-president Gatch invited the student back for Latin and French courses. Powell insisted the student should first have to atone in some way for his offense, but the Board endorsed Gatch’s opinion over the professor’s.10

Ultimately, Powell developed a unique style of discipline which relied on his close bond with students. While two students were misbehaving during his study hours, Powell found he needed to return to his house for something. Instead of expelling the boys (as any other professor would have done) he put them to work. The three of them spent the rest of the day running errands on campus and in Salem. Students were free to joke around with him—he was amiable about a group of boys sneaking a silly hat onto his head—but not without Powell returning the favor.11 He said of two young men who came back from studying abroad, “if the difference in learning and eloquence came from going abroad or staying at-home, they would all better stay at home.”12

As all new teachers must, he had to prove himself made to last. Students came to appreciate his uniqueness and sense of humor. On one occasion, Powell was teaching about the musculature in the human face and scalp. To explain a concept, he asked the class to move their scalps without moving their heads. He demonstrated the movement himself. “He had a shaggy head of hair,” a student writes, “always uncombed, each individual hair standing on end, and he could turn his scalp almost halfway around his head. The success which attended his maiden effort before the class was so astonishingly complete that it brought forth a roar of laughter in which the Professor heartily joined.”13

While his humor and iconic shaggy, uncombed head were so beloved by the student body that they gave him the nickname “Cube Root” Powell14, the Board disliked his “easygoing ways and carelessness concerning his physical appearance.”15 This tension would follow him throughout his time at Willamette, yet as he passed a year and then two, it became clear that he’d proved himself to the Trustees just as he had to the students. Upon the resignation of President Thomas Gatch, the Board trusted Powell enough to appoint him as interim president. He held that position for less than a year, after which he resumed his teaching duties. He soon proved himself a serious man and formidable public servant.

MARION COUNTY’S FIRST SUPERINTENDENT

April 1865 marked a turning point for the nation with the surrender of Robert E. Lee in Virginia, effectively ending the Civil War. It was equally important for Powell’s life. On April 10th, The Oregon Weekly Statesman reported that Powell had been appointed the first ever Superintendent of Schools for Marion County.16 It was a mark of the country’s rapid growth that for an Oregonian like Powell, the Missouri of his childhood memories was no longer the edge of the colonial frontier but the setting of some of the last guerilla battles in a distant war.17 

The Statesman writes of Powell’s appointment as Superintendent, “All who know the Professor will agree that he can not only fill the place, but that he is an excellent man for that office.” There were 3,041 scholars enrolled in the county at that time. If anyone thought he was going to change his personality for the office, however, they were mistaken. A teacher in the county told him that she was not going to teach another term because she did not feel qualified. Powell replied by slamming a book on the desk and saying “Qualify yourself!”

Powell’s work as County Superintendent shines later in his tenure. In particular, he emerges as an advocate of free education. A county tax was proposed in 1871 to establish free schools for Marion County’s children—political conflict ensued. Powell endorsed the tax as a necessity. He understood that the county’s decision on free schools would define the state’s approach. If free schools were rejected in Marion County, it would have resulted in a significant blow to free schools in Oregon. The April 26th issue of the Statesman describes a school board meeting in which Powell argued passionately for the tax, eventually securing the board’s support and passage of the tax.

In reply to the argument that it is not right to tax the man of property to educate the poor man’s children he asked who it was that built up the wealth of the city of Salem—the capitalists or the laboring men? He urged that it was the laborer and the man of moderate means who had done it, and that it was but right that the product of his labor should pay a small sum to educate the children of the city, especially as such education would benefit the capitalist as well as the poor man.18

Amidst the politicking, Powell still found time for leisure—the kind of leisure which suited his need for movement. The professor often took parties to climb Mt. Hood.19 Even when he opted for activities a little more relaxing, there was never a dull moment. On August 23rd, 1871, the Statesman reports, “Professor L. J. Powell and family leave to-day for Salmon river, there to enjoy for a while the pleasure of having nothing to do but a good deal of recreation.”20 A week later, an update on this recreation appears, “Prof. L. J. Powell who is now at Salmon river with his family met with an accident which will probably compel him to remain several days. Upon arriving at the beach he turned his horses out to grass, and when brought up in the morning to feed it was found that one of them had his leg nearly severed. It looked as if it had been cut with a knife.”21

News clipping about trip to Mt. Hood
The Oregon Weekly Statesman, August 26th, 1870, 4.

LATER LIFE

In 1876, Powell left Willamette to serve for two years as president of the Albany College Institute (known today as Lewis and Clark College). By 1878, he found himself dedicated to the same causes he had pursued in Marion County, only now on a larger scale with his election as Superintendent of Public Instruction for the State of Oregon. For the first time, the Oregon School Code provided for free high schools, which relied on funding from a tax levy. Powell endorsed this move while Harvey Scott, then editor and part-owner of The Oregonian, wrote an editorial claiming free high schools violated the integrity of education.22 Powell responded, and history repeated itself in another exchange of conflicting editorials on education policy. Powell claimed that Scott mythologized some era of education which never existed. He wrote in one of his editorials that the best schools he’d seen in Oregon were the free public schools of Portland, rather than older institutions dominated by what he described as “the slipshod, routine, parrot-like, memorizing methods of our grandfathers.”23

After a lifetime dedicated to education, Powell settled into a new position in one last school. He left his job as Superintendent to become president of the University of Washington (then named “Washington University”) which he led from 1882 until his death in 1887. In the fall of 1883, Powell welcomed throngs of jubilant travelers to a campus covered in banners and bunting.24 The celebration was for the Golden Spike, the connection of the eastern and western lines of the Northern Pacific Railroad. One could now take a train from Seattle to Minnesota, across land that Powell’s generation had once imagined as a vast, untamed wilderness. When Powell’s father settled the family in Missouri in 1837, they had believed they were living on the edge of civilization itself.

Although his health began to decline in 1886, he managed the university through graduation exercises for the class of ’87. Reports say that his dedication to his work worsened his health, so he traveled outside Seattle for a change of climate.25 He died soon afterwards. His body was taken to the cemetery by a long procession of his former students.

L.J. Powell’s work as a reverend appears little in the historical record, but his obituary explains why: his faith was less clerical and more about service in everyday life. His obituary reads, “He was a Christian of that strong and useful type whose life is given up to doing hard work for humanity and God.” His hard work was fighting for education and future generations, or perhaps just keeping his mother’s promise. Powell kept at this work until the final days of his life, a suggestion that it was never finished. Death caught him in a blur of motion.

One of the reverend’s letters to the Oregonian editors reads as so strikingly contemporary, a reminder that Powell’s work is in fact unfinished, and continues still. “No-one can deny,” he wrote, “looking at the matter in the light of the marked tendencies of the last twenty years, that the vast wealth of this young and vigorous nation is gravitating to the hands of the few, massing itself in immense and powerful corporations, leaving a large class of people more or less at their mercy.”26 The way out of this situation, Powell argued, was to champion education. Although the editorial advocates for monetary funding specifically, he might have also been referring to his entire life when he wrote that investment in education was “the most profitable investment any people can make.”

Endnotes

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  1. Frank E. Hodgkin, and J.J. Galvin, Pen Pictures of Representative Men of Oregon, 1882, 163-164.
  2. CPI Inflation Calculator, https://www.officialdata.org/us/inflation/1845?amount=1000 .
  3. See note 1.
  4. H. K. Hines, “Rev. L. J. Powell, A. M.,” Pacific Christian Advocate XXXIII, no. 34, (August 25th, 1887): 5.
  5.  See 1.
  6. Robert Moulton Gatke, Chronicles of Willamette (Portland, Or: Binfords & Mort, 1943), 242.
  7. Robert Moulton Gatke, Chronicles of Willamette (Portland, Or: Binfords & Mort, 1943),  229-230.
  8. Luther D. Cook, Willamette in the Seventies, 20–24, Robert M. Gatke “Chronicles of Willamette” Research Collection, Box 4, Folder 24, Archives and Special Collections, Mark O. Hatfield Library, Willamette University.
  9. Robert Moulton Gatke, Chronicles of Willamette (Portland, Or: Binfords & Mort, 1943), 271.
  10.  Gustavus Hines, Oregon and its Institutions: Comprising a Full History of the Willamette University, the First Established on the Pacific Coast, 1868, 243-244.
  11. “City and County Items – Presentation,” The Oregon Weekly Statesman, April 12th, 1871, 1.
  12. Susan Harrison McKinney, letter to Robert Moulton Gatke, 1921, Robert M. Gatke “Chronicles of Willamette” Research Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Mark O. Hatfield Library, Willamette University.
  13.  T. T. Geer, Fifty Years in Oregon (New York: The Neale Publishing Company, 1911), 114–116.
  14. See note 7.
  15. Robert Moulton Gatke, Chronicles of Willamette (Portland, Or: Binfords & Mort, 1943), 282-283.
  16.  “Local and State News – Marion County School Matters,” The Oregon Statesman, April 10th, 1865, 3.
  17.  See note 7.
  18. “School Meeting — Free Schools,” The Oregon Weekly Statesman, April 26th, 1871, 3.
  19. “General News,” The Oregon Weekly Statesman, August 26th, 1870, 4.
  20. “The City and County-Coast Items,” The Oregon Weekly Statesman, August 23rd, 1871, 2.
  21. “The City and County-Coast Items,”The Oregon Weekly Statesman, August 30th, 1871, 2.
  22. Donald J. Sevetson, “George Atkinson, Harvey Scott, and the Portland High School Controversy of 1880,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 108, no. 3 (Fall 2007).
  23. The Oregonian, March 1, 1880.
  24. Clarence Bagley, History of Seattle from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time (Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1916), 144.
  25. “Obituary,” The Genealogical Forum of Oregon, August 18, 1887, “1887: May–Aug,” https://gfo.org/resources/indexes/other-indexes/news/1887-may—aug.html.
  26. L. J. Powell, “Education Versus Crime,” The Oregonian, March 31, 1880, 3.

Works Referenced

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  • Bagley, Clarence. History of Seattle from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time. Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1916.
  • “City and County Items – Presentation.” The Oregon Weekly Statesman, April 12, 1871, 1.
  • Cook, Luther D. Willamette in the Seventies, 20–24. Robert M. Gatke “Chronicles of Willamette” Research Collection, Box 4, Folder 24. Archives and Special Collections, Mark O. Hatfield Library, Willamette University.
  • CPI Inflation Calculator. https://www.officialdata.org/us/inflation/1845?amount=1000.
  • “General News.” The Oregon Weekly Statesman, August 26, 1870, 4.
  • Geer, T. T. Fifty Years in Oregon. New York: The Neale Publishing Company, 1911.
  • Gatke, Robert Moulton. Chronicles of Willamette. Portland, OR: Binfords & Mort, 1943.
  • Hines, Gustavus. Oregon and Its Institutions: Comprising a Full History of the Willamette University, the First Established on the Pacific Coast. 1868.
  • Hines, H. K. “Rev. L. J. Powell, A. M.” Pacific Christian Advocate 33, no. 34 (August 25, 1887): 5.
  • Hodgkin, Frank E., and J. J. Galvin. Pen Pictures of Representative Men of Oregon. 1882.
  • McKinney, Susan Harrison. Letter to Robert M. Gatke, 1921. Susan Harrison McKinney, letter to Robert Moulton Gatke, 1921, Robert M. Gatke “Chronicles of Willamette” Research Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Mark O. Hatfield Library, Willamette University.
  • “Obituary.” The Genealogical Forum of Oregon, August 18, 1887. “1887: May–Aug.” https://gfo.org/resources/indexes/other-indexes/news/1887-may—aug.html
  • “The City and County–Coast Items.” The Oregon Weekly Statesman, August 23, 1871, 2.
  • ———. The Oregon Weekly Statesman, August 30, 1871, 2.
  • “Local and State News – Marion County School Matters.” The Oregon Statesman, April 10, 1865, 3.
  • Powell, L. J. “Education Versus Crime.” The Oregonian, March 31, 1880, 3.
  • “School Meeting – Free Schools.” The Oregon Weekly Statesman, April 26, 1871, 3.
  • Sevetson, Donald J. “George Atkinson, Harvey Scott, and the Portland High School Controversy of 1880.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 108, no. 3 (Fall 2007).

Image Citations

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  • “University Hall surrounded by a fence,” Willamette University Digital Collections, https://hdl.handle.net/10177/25351
  • “Leonard Jackson Powell.” Photograph. University of Washington Archives and Special Collections, Seattle, Washington.
  • “General News,” The Oregon Weekly Statesman, August 26th, 1870, 4.

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