Page:Autobiographies and portraits of the President, cabinet, Supreme court, and Fifty-fifth Congress (IA autobiographiesp02neal).pdf/37

 JAMES WILSON

, of Traer, Tama County, Iowa, Secretary of Agriculture, was born in Ayrshire, Scotland, August 16, 1835; in 1852 he came to the United States, settling in Connecticut with his parents; in 1855 he went to Iowa, locating in Tama County, where, as early as 1861, he engaged in farming on his own account; was elected to the State legislature, and served in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth general assemblies, being speaker of the house in the last-mentioned assembly; was elected to Congress in 1872, and served in the Forty-Third, Forty-Fourth, and Forty-Eighth Congresses; in the interim between the Forty-Fourth and Forty-Eighth Congresses served as a member of the Railway Commission; from 1870 to 1874 was a regent of the State University, and for the past six years has been director of the agricultural experiment station and professor of agriculture at the Iowa Agricultural College at Ames; during his entire public life he has controlled and directed the management of his own farm, and in every public office he has held has been elected or appointed as a representative farmer, whether in the legislature, on the Railroad Commission, in Congress, or at the college; while in Congress he was always a member of the Committee on Agriculture of the House, and was very early identified with legislation making the Department of Agriculture an Executive Department; introduced and secured the passage of a bill to that end in the Forty-Third Congress; later he worked in earnest coöperation with the late W. H. Hatch, of Missouri, for legislation for the suppression of contagious diseases, under which the much-dreaded contagious pleuro-pneumonia was effectually eradicated from the United States by the Bureau of Animal Industry of the Department over which he now presides; was confirmed Secretary of Agriculture March 5, 1897.