JSB was born in Stafford, NY (1838) and grew up on the family farm. Determined to get an education, he persuaded his father to release him from the custom & law requiring farm boys to work on the farm to 21.  At age 15 he started teaching to earn money for college. Unable to afford housing, he lived at home and walked seven miles each way to the school, still continuing his farm chores. He enrolled at Oberlin College, but because of his mother's death and his own illness he stayed only a year. After teaching another three years he went west to Hudson, WI with his brother Henry.  He describes this as a  difficult time; he lacked money, and finding work was hard.  He once walked 75 miles to apply for job. He worked as a farm hand, teacher, in door to door sales. He enrolled at University of Wisconsin but got typhoid and was, again, there just a year.

   In 1862 he and brother Luther Byron (LBB) took jobs in the Secret Service of the War Department headed by their cousin, Lafayette C. Baker. One of their more unusual  assignments was as plainclothes detectives accompanying 600 Southern women, stranded in the North when the war broke out, on the boat taking them back to Richmond.  While in the Secret Service, JSB proposed raising a D.C. battalion which required and received an act of Congress. JSB commanded that cavalry unit for three years, rising from captain to major. His older brother, LBB, served under him.  Toward the end of his service he was captured and spent time in Libby Prison. His brother left the service before he did. Rejoining the secret service, LBB took part in the capture of John Wilkes Booth.

     When JSB left the army (1865) he and LBB moved to Lansing, MI where their cousin Lafayette lived. There he taught school and worked in the Michigan state land office. He also met and married Alice Potter (1868).  After ten years in Lansing he moved with his wife and three children to St. Croix Falls in the Wisconsin wilderness, where he remained until his death (1912).  JSB thrived on the frontier. Alice was distressed by lack of genteel society and a church, so JSB led the building of the town’s first church, First Presbyterian.  He also built the first water works.  

   He was employed by Cushing’s land agency, which had extensive timber holdings. This work required him to travel throughout the region -- surveying, managing the properties, paying taxes.  Later, he and his son Harry renamed the company Baker Land and Title and shifted to  general real estate.  He acquired considerable land holdings for himself, both forest and lake front property. In his later years he became interested in forestry and made extensive experimental tree plantings near his home. His activities, however, were limited by his deafness which was total for his last 20 years.