Our Arklahoma Heritage : A Vinta-born son of a feed store owner wound up as a two-term governor of Illinois

James Robert Edgar was born on July 22, 1946, in Vinita, the seat of Craig County in northeastern Oklahoma, the youngest of three sons of Cecil and Betty (Elizabeth Moore) Edgar.

His parents, both originally from Coles County in east-central Illinois, had moved to Oklahoma shortly after World War II so that Cecil could join some of Betty’s cousins in a feed and agricultural-supplies business. The family remained in the Vinita area for roughly three or four years.

During that brief Oklahoma sojourn, the Edgars attended the First Baptist Church, where relatives were already members, and Cecil himself was baptized. Annual family visits back to Vinita continued long after the move north, and young Jim later recalled riding horses and absorbing the open landscape of Craig County on those trips.

The Edgars’ own roots, however, lay farther east. Jim’s great-grandfather, James Edgar, had left Bury St Edmunds in England as a teenager around 1856 and settled directly in Coles County, Illinois, where he farmed, attended the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debate in Charleston, and later became active in the Methodist church and local banking.

On his mother’s side, Marshall Moore had come from Ohio to Humboldt, Illinois, and operated a general store. Betty, the youngest of several siblings, was raised largely by her father after her mother’s early death. The family’s wartime years had been spent nearby in Parsons, Kansas, where Cecil, deferred from military service because he already had two young sons and was in his thirties, worked in an armament plant producing ammunition.

In 1949, the family returned to Illinois and settled in Charleston, a college town of roughly ten thousand people that offered the educational advantages of Eastern Illinois University. Cecil ran a small office-supply business. When Jim was seven, in 1953, his father was killed in an automobile accident while traveling to a Chicago White Sox game.

Betty, left to raise three boys on a modest income, took a clerk’s job at the university and rented rooms in the family’s house near campus. Church members at the local Baptist congregation became an extended support network. The lessons Jim absorbed were practical and quiet: hard work, straightforwardness, civility, and the expectation that one did not complain.

His parents had been nominal Democrats, yet in first grade during the 1952 presidential election Jim organized a mock campaign for Dwight Eisenhower at Franklin Elementary School. When Eisenhower won the school vote, the boy declared himself a Republican and never looked back.

He continued running for class offices through elementary, junior-high, and high-school years, served as class president and student-council president, and graduated from Charleston High School in 1964. After one year at Wabash College in Indiana, he transferred home to Eastern Illinois University, majored in history, and in 1967 was elected student-body president.

He married fellow student Brenda Smith of Anna, Illinois, that same year; they would raise two children, Brad and Elizabeth.

Edgar’s political career began immediately after his 1968 graduation. He became a legislative intern and then a staff aide to powerful Republican leaders in the Illinois General Assembly, including Senate President Pro Tem W. Russell Arrington.

After an unsuccessful 1974 bid for the state House, he won election in 1976 and was reelected in 1978, serving on appropriations, human-resources, and revenue committees and often acting as a swing vote.

In 1979 Governor Jim Thompson appointed the young legislator his director of legislative affairs. When Secretary of State Alan Dixon moved to the U.S. Senate, Thompson named Edgar to fill the vacancy in January 1981.

Edgar won full terms in 1982 and 1986 by the largest statewide margin of the era. As secretary, he made driver’s licenses a privilege rather than a right, strengthened breathalyzer rules and administrative suspensions for suspected drunk drivers, helped push a national drinking age of twenty-one, and served on President Reagan’s commission on the issue. He also secured mandatory auto insurance, launched literacy programs, and oversaw construction of a new Illinois State Library.

In 1990, Edgar narrowly defeated Democratic Attorney General Neil Hartigan to become Illinois’s thirty-eighth governor. He inherited a nearly billion-dollar deficit amid a national recession. Refusing to let a temporary income-tax surcharge expire, he made it permanent, imposed spending cuts, reduced the state workforce by about 2,500 positions while protecting education, and eventually left office with a surplus and improved bond ratings.

Education funding rose substantially; Chicago’s public schools underwent major restructuring; and a minimum per-pupil funding guarantee was established. Child-welfare reforms, including faster adoptions under Project Heart,

increased placements from roughly seven hundred to more than four thousand annually. Welfare-to-work efforts moved tens of thousands of families into employment. During the Great Flood of 1993, he mobilized the National Guard and personally joined sandbagging efforts.

Conservation measures preserved open space, converted former military land into the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, and earned him recognition as a leading environmental steward. Reelected in 1994 with a landslide that carried 101 of the state’s 102 counties, including Cook County, he declined a third term and left office in January 1999.

Thereafter, he founded the bipartisan Edgar Fellows Program at the University of Illinois, which has trained hundreds of emerging public leaders, and remained a quiet but respected voice for moderation and institutional competence.

Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in early 2025, Edgar died on September 14, 2025, at age seventy-nine in Springfield from complications of treatment. His body lay in state in the Capitol rotunda, one of only a few governors accorded that honor.

Funeral services were held at Central Baptist Church in Springfield, the congregation the family had joined in 1967 and where their son had been married. He was buried at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, near the tomb of Abraham Lincoln.

Survivors included his wife of fifty-eight years, Brenda, their two children, and five grandchildren.

Across party lines, he was remembered as a steady, scandal-free public servant whose emphasis on fiscal discipline, education, and civility left a durable imprint on Illinois.