Former Gov. Jim Edgar remembered with memorial at Illinois Capitol
A bipartisan crowd of dignitaries and family members bid farewell to former Gov. Jim Edgar at a memorial service held Saturday morning at Central Baptist Church in Springfield.
Edgar, Illinois’ 38th governor who served from 1991 to 1999, died Sept. 14 after disclosing an aggressive cancer diagnosis earlier this year. He was 79.
The memorial service was livestreamed and can be viewed on YouTube.
Though he’d been out of power for 26 years — more time than the two decades he spent in office as an elected official — the former governor was still active in Illinois political circles until the end of his life, heading a bipartisan program to develop up-and-coming leaders from across Illinois.
Edgar’s family confirmed he’d died “from complications related to treatment for pancreatic cancer,” a diagnosis he’d made public in February.
Despite his failing health, Edgar still made public appearances in the last months of his life, including in August at his 2025 Edgar Fellows program in Urbana, though the former governor had to make an emergency room trip during the gathering.
A moderate Republican, Edgar became symbolic of a near-extinct breed of GOP politics in the years since he left office. He wasn’t the only elected Republican in Illinois with a pro-choice stance on abortion, but Edgar and his contemporaries were still in the minority at a time when the GOP was still a powerhouse in state politics.
But as hard-line Republican politics became ascendent nationally, the GOP’s power in Illinois dwindled, making Edgar somewhat of a political nomad. The former governor became a vocal critic of President Donald Trump, and last year campaigned with other Republicans for then-Vice President Kamala Harris’ unsuccessful bid for the White House.
Edgar’s bipartisan leadership program and disavowing hard-right figures like Trump made the former governor plenty of allies in the Democratic Party, including Gov. JB Pritzker, who said he considered Edgar a “friend and mentor.”
“Jim Edgar believed deeply in our individual and our collective responsibility to one another,” Pritzker said Saturday speaking at the service. “That regardless of where we live, what we look like or who we voted for, our foremost obligation is to serve one another. That is how he governed, and that is how he lived.”
“Earnestness, honesty, unwavering loyalty to the people he served have made Jim Edgar an icon of the great state of Illinois, no matter what party you belong to,” Pritzker said. “His impact is incalculable and it changed our state forever.”
Edgar’s death follows that of his immediate successor, former Gov. George Ryan, in May.
Edgar was born in rural northeast Oklahoma but grew up in Charleston, Illinois. He later attended college in his adopted hometown at Eastern Illinois University, where the future governor was elected student body president.
According to his website, Edgar was in first grade when he ran Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1952 campaign in his elementary school’s mock election, cementing his lifelong status as a Republican, though his parents were Democrats.
After college, Edgar served as an intern and then staffer for Republican legislative leaders before himself getting elected to the Illinois House in 1976 at age 30. In the middle of Edgar’s second term, then-Republican Gov. Jim Thompson tapped the young lawmaker to become his legislative liaison.
Thompson then appointed Edgar as secretary of state in 1981, an office he held for a decade until he was sworn in as governor in 1991.