Benjamin FREELAND was born in Ross, Edgar Co., IL. He was one of eleven children. He had a twin brother, Joseph E. FREELAND.

Marriage Record for Name: Benj. E. Freeland
Gender: Male
Marital status: Single, Race: White, Birth Place: Ills.
Marriage Date: 28 Nov 1883, Marriage Place: Corydon, Wayne, Iowa
Father: F. A. Freeland, Mother: E. C. Kirby
Spouse: Julia Ann Graham
FHL Film Number: 1009070, Reference ID: 2:3R4WKD7
Contributor: Jean Wilson (48841367) • [email protected]

THE DES MOINES REGISTER, Des Moines, Iowa. Friday, 17 Mar 1939
GIVES DRAKE 3 PROPERTIES
Benjamin E. Freeland Donates His Home.
Drake University trustees have accepted the gift of a Des Moines home and two properties from Benjamin E. Freeland, it was announced Thursday.
The home, in which Mr. Freeland and his late wife lived many years, is located at 1155 Twenty-fifth St. The other two properties are at 960 and 1347 Twenty-third st.
In the home is a Chickering piano, which Mr. Freeland also has given the University. It belonged to his wife, the former Annie J. Graham.
Sacred Music. Mr. Freeland suggested his former home and the piano might be used as the nucleus for an enlarged department of sacred music in the university’s Bible college.
The Freelands made three gifts to the university before Mrs. Freeland’s death last year.
In 1907 they gave the school a farm near Corydon, Ia., and the farm was sold 10 years later for $25,000, the proceeds becoming the B.E. And Annie J. Freeland fund. In 1915, the couple gave Drake a $2,000 equity in a house on west University ave., establishing another fund.
Farm. The last of the three gifts was made in 1929, when the Freelands gave the school an 80 acre farm in Wayne county, a small business block in Allerton, Ia., and $1,000 in cash. The block still is occupied by an Allerton newspaper.
Mr. Freeland, 80, was born in Illinois and moved with his family to a farm near Corydon when he was 6. He married in 1882 and moved to Corydon, where he became farm loan agent for the Union Central Life Insurance Co. of Cincinnati, Ohio.
Mr. & Mrs. Freeland moved to Des Moines in 1908 in 1908, to a home at 1108 Twenty-fifth St. They later built the home at 1155 Twenty-fifth St., which Mr. Freeland has now given to Drake as a memorial to his wife.
Contributor: Jean Wilson (48841367) • [email protected]