The history of Colby College, Part 19

Author: Colby College
Publication date: 1963
Publisher: Waterville, Colby College Press
Number of Pages: 716

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This new grant sold as slowly as had the original Argyle lands. Needing money badly for remodeling of South College and for other expenses, the Trustees authorized the Prudential Committee, in 1874, to negotiate sale of all wild lands belonging to the College, and if satisfactory sale could not be made, to mortgage the lands.

As late as 1893, the College still held title to 8600 acres, or about three- quarters of the grant in Township 6, Range 17, and 5785 acres, about one-quarter, in Township 11, Range 16. The committee was instructed to hasten sale of those remaining acres. But the whole nation was soon hard hit by the financial panic of 1893, and in the following year the committee reported that they had not pushed for land sales because of the distressed situation of the country.

It was at the annual meeting in 1899, thirty-eight years after the Maine legis- lature had made the grant, that the Trustees finally learned that they were no longer owners of wild land in the Maine woods. The last holdings in the northern tract had gone for $1.40 an acre, yielding $12,327. In the southern tract, the price had been only 83 cents an acre, and the yield only $4705. But happily, unlike the old Argyle business, these sales involved no notes, and the whole $18,032 had been paid into the college treasury. The committee pointed out that the lower value of the southern tract was owing to the depletion of its timber. Already it had been cut and had provided the College with a substantial sum for stumpage.

The grant of those lands north of Moosebead Lake proved much more profit- able than had the grant on the Penobscot. Altogether the College received $47,370.1 That was the final result of more than eighty years that Colby College spent in the real estate business. It was a long time, filled with much work and much anxiety. It concerned good and bad settlers, honest and shady speculators, surveyors and agents, lumber buyers and mill builders, squatters and timber thieves. And, though it all brought in less than $75,000, that money made a lot of difference to a college treasurer who too often had to close his books in red ink rather than black.

CHAPTER XV

Calm Before The Storm

W. HEN President Sheldon resigned, the Trustees were eager to place Pro- fessor Champlin in the presidential chair, but he would not consent. He did agree to serve as Acting President until the Board found a successor to Sheldon. The senior professor picked up the administrative reins just in time to be in the midst of a bitter controversy between the Board and their former treasurer, James Stackpole, who had resigned both the treasurership and his trusteeship in 1851. Stackpole claimed that the College owed him $1200 for services. After giving the former treasurer a hearing before the full Board, the Trustees voted unan- imously that he was entitled to no further claim. The matter dragged on for several years, during which Stackpole refused to turn over $1200 of the college funds which he had held back when his accounts were settled. Finally he gave up the fight, and returned the money at the rate of $200 a year for six years. It was a most unfortunate affair, alienating a prominent Waterville family which had long been identified with the College. The evidence available a hundred years after the event clearly indicates, however, that the Trustees were right. Stackpole had received all the compensation legally voted to him. His further claim may have had some grounds in oral conversation with individual trustees, but it had never been confirmed by vote.

During that interim period Champlin also had to face dissension in the faculty and complaints from students about some of the instruction. The onus was borne chiefly by Samuel K. Smith, who had become Professor of Rhetoric in 1850, and whose teaching load by 1853 had become unreasonably heavy. The whole matter was laid before the Trustees at their annual meeting in that year. A committee was appointed "to inquire whether the Department of Rhetoric and Elocution, as now conducted, meets the demands of college discipline and the just and reasonable expectations of the guardians thereof." The same committee was asked to consider "whether any different distribution can be made of the duties assigned to the different professors, or any transfer of professors to other departments, which would be more in the interest of the College and the value of its instruction; also whether changes may profitably be made in methods of instruction." The committee recommended that Professor Kendall Brooks be transferred from Chemistry and Natural History to Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. That change opened the way for the appointment to the faculty of a man who was to play a distinguished part in promoting the welfare of the College, for Charles E. Hamlin was in 1853 made Professor of Chemistry and Natural History. The inquiry into the Department of Rhetoric ended with a more reasonable teaching load for Smith.

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The man who had been most gratified by President Sheldon's resignation was the secretary of the Trustees, Rev. Nathan Wood, stern Calvinist pastor of the Waterville Baptist Church. He at once began a campaign for the reelection of the former president, Robert Pattison, who had headed the College fifteen years earlier and whose Baptist conservatism was assured. At the annual meet- ing in 1853, Wood secured a vote, inviting Pattison to return to the presidency at $1200 a year, and giving him three months to decide whether to accept. Re- luctantly, but with sincere desire to help the College when it had suffered such a severe blow by the simultaneous loss of Sheldon, Loomis and Keely, Dr. Pat- tison returned to the presidency in 1854.

When Pattison began his second administration, the financial condition of the College was somewhat better than it had been in the 1840's. Tuition had been raised to ten dollars a term ($30 a year). Each year's operation was showing a slight surplus. Enrollment exceeded 90 students, and it became dif- ficult for five full-time teachers and a part-time teaching president to give the necessary instruction. Champlin took care of Greek and Latin, with the help of Tutor Theophilus Abbott. In addition to his teaching of rhetoric and elocu- tion, Samuel K. Smith was librarian. Mathematics and Natural Philosophy (to- day designated as physics) was taught by Brooks, while Chemistry and Natural History (botany, zoology, geology, paleontology, etc.) were in the hands of Ham- lin. The Trustees determined to add another man to the faculty, and voted:

The cause of education and the best interests of the College demand the establishment of another professorship at the earliest practical mo- ment when funds for its endowment can be obtained.

To implement the above vote, the Board authorized the raising of $20,000 by public subscription, of which $12,000 would be used to endow the new pro- fessorship and $8000 would be set aside as a scholarship fund. To induce pros- pective givers, the same scheme was employed as that used when funds were raised for Recitation Hall, except that this time double use of the same dollar was not contemplated. But donors could still control designated scholarships: The vote of the Board provided:

When any person shall subscribe and pay at least $500, that sum shall constitute a scholarship, to receive the name designated by the donor, who shall be entitled during his life to the nomination of the candidate to receive the benefit of the same.

Records of the many financial campaigns conducted before 1900 do not always make clear the compensation paid to the agents, but in this case it is laid down in the minutes of the Trustees. The agent was to receive a salary of $400 a year, his traveling expenses, and one and one-half percent of all money he col- lected.

When Professor Brooks resigned in 1855, Moses Lyford became Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, in which position he rendered distin- guished service for twenty-eight years.

At their annual meeting in August, 1855, the Trustees decided the time had come to raise substantial endowment. They set the proposed figure at $50,000, an amount far beyond any previous attempt. That Secretary Wood and his fellow conservative Baptists had a hand in working out the provisions is made clear by the Board's vote that,

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as soon as the sum of $50,000 has been paid into the treasury, the room rent of all worthy candidates for the ministry who are students in the College shall be remitted, and one thousand dollars shall be appro- priated annually to maintain a theological course.

To be sure that the theological course would be sound and orthodox, it was voted that,

the lectures in this course and details of the department shall be ar- ranged by a committee of three from the Trustees of the College in co- operation with a committee of three appointed by the Maine Baptist Convention.

The plan failed to materialize, and the theological course, which Babcock had unsuccessfully tried to revive many years earlier, was never reestablished.

By 1856 the College was again having trouble collecting its bills. Although a bond of $200 was legally required from each student, the requirement seems not to have been enforced, and the treasurer reported a long list of delinquents. The Board therefore voted to authorize the treasurer "to bring suit, if necessary, to collect all debts for term bills or other indebtedness, which had been pending for more than two years."

When the Trustees assembled in annual meeting in 1856, for the first time since 1821 they met without the presence of the man who had more than once saved the institution from bankruptcy, Squire Timothy Boutelle. In gratitude for his distinguished service, the Board spread upon their records this memorial of that leading citizen of Waterville, who had died in the previous autumn.

In 1821, when this Board was incorporated, Hon. T. Boutelle was one of its members and continued in this office till his decease, November 12, 1855, aged 78 years. While we leave it to the religious society with which he was connected [Boutelle was not a Baptist] to estimate his re- ligious character, and to his political friends to care for his fame as a statesman, and to members of the legal profession to set forth his abilities as a counselor at law, and to the people of Waterville, where he resided for more than half a century, to honor his virtues as a citizen, we feel it our duty and privilege to record our recollections of him as a wise and judicious friend of science and literature and as a firm and persevering friend of Waterville College. He appreciated mental culture and es- teemed its worth in all degrees of its progress. He saw its importance in our growing country and was ready to labor and sacrifice for its ad- vancement. He cultivated science as a pleasant and useful employment through life. The minds which he helped to cultivate are living me- morials of the worth of his labors.

The year of 1856 was also momentous in seeing the salaries of all professors placed for the first time at a thousand dollars a year. It must be admitted, how- ever, that this decision was not quite so generous as appeared on the surface. The "nigger in the woodpile" was the proposal made by the faculty, each of whom offered to give $200 a year for two years, provided the salaries were raised from $800 to $1,000. This meant that, for the two year period the College would be taking the increase out of one pocket only to put it into another.

President Pattison's health failed, and in 1857 he presented his resignation. His decision to resign may have been prompted as much by his discouragement

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over conditions at the College as by concern for his own health. The campaign for funds was not prospering. Enrollment, which had totaled 91 in 1854-55, had fallen to 66 in 1855-56, and stood at only 68 in 1856-57. The fall of 1854 had seen 25 freshmen enter the College, but in the following autumn there were only twelve. In fact, in 1855-56, the freshmen class was smallest of the four, there being nineteen seniors, twenty juniors, twenty-two sophomores, and three men in the partial course. The year showed a substantial financial deficit, and the prediction for 1856-57 was no better. At any rate, for his own health and the health of the College, President Pattison had had enough.

This time the Trustees were determined to get the man whom they had really wanted in 1853, and now their importunity was successful. James Tift Champlin agreed to assume the presidency.

Champlin had come to the College as Professor of Greek and Latin in 1841, from the pastorship of the First Baptist Church in Portland. Born in Colchester, Connecticut, in 1811, he had graduated from Brown in 1834, and had served his alma mater as a tutor until 1838, when he became pastor of the Portland Church. In 1839 he married Mary Ann Pierce, a Providence girl of his tutor days at Brown. In a biographical sketch, Henry S. Burrage wrote:

Much as he loved his work, a bronchial difficulty that had troubled him from the beginning of his pastorate increased and there were times when he was unable to preach.1

When the call came to a professorship at Waterville, Champlin considered it just the position best suited to his health and his talents. He knew he would have to conduct classes and talk to students, but he believed he would not be called upon for long discourses from pulpit or platform. How little he knew what lay ahead for him! In his letter of resignation to his Portland Church, Champlin set forth his reasons for accepting the professorship:

As this office will enable me to avail myself of my early studies and at the same time present a field of usefulness perhaps fully as important as the ministry, while it will relieve me of the most injurious part of my present employment, I feel myself bound to ask my dismission as pastor of this church, in anticipation of accepting the appointment.

The correspondence between Champlin and the Church would indicate that he came to Waterville a sick man, but fortunately the illness was temporary. Before he had been at the College a year, he was doing a lot of preaching and giving public addresses in behalf of the institution. As the years went by, his strength seemed to increase rather than diminish, so that he became not only the most dynamic but also the most successful of all Colby presidents up to his time.

In his memorial biography of Champlin, Dr. Burrage described the College as the Portland pastor found it on his arrival.

Waterville was then a remote country village on the stage line between Augusta and Bangor. For twenty years the College had struggled against poverty, and as yet only the beginning of a collegiate institution had been made. It was still a day of small things. The endowment was all but non-existent, salaries were low, and the classes were small. But the College had a strong corps of instructors. Three of them, George Keely, Justin Loomis, and Champlin himself, were graduates of Brown,

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imbibing the methods and spirit of Brown's great president, Dr. Way- land. They were soon joined by Martin B. Anderson. All four were men of intellectual strength, and by their ability and sound scholarship they gave to the College a reputation which it had not before secured.2

Champlin at once revealed his scholarly abilities. Dissatisfied with existing editions of Demosthenes' "Oration on the Crown", he prepared a new edition with extensive historical and explanatory notes-a work so well done that for more than thirty years it was a textbook in most American colleges. Before he became President in 1857, Champlin had added to this publication Select Popular Orations of Demosthenes, a translation from the German of Kuchner's Latin Grammar, Aeschines' On the Crown, and A Short and Comprehensive Greek Grammar. In 1855, in recognition of the scholarship shown in his publications, the University of Rochester conferred upon him an honorary degree.

The three Brown graduates who were members of the Waterville faculty must have been greatly heartened in 1859, when the trustees of the two colleges agreed to a joint campaign for funds, with Rev. Horace Love of New York as agent. The Waterville College campaign for $50,000 was made a part of that concerted effort, but as we have already seen, it soon collapsed and Champlin, together with his faculty colleagues, had to rake its dying ashes.

No man knew better than did Champlin the kind of task he faced when he became President in 1857. For sixteen years he had been close to every aspect of the college life; for one year after Pattison's resignation, he had served as Acting President and Chairman of the Prudential Committee. He knew the mem- bers of the Board intimately and could distinguish between those who were ready to fight and sacrifice for the college and those who merely "also ran." He had seen the enrollment fall from 91 to 66 in a single year. He was aware of the recent annual deficits. But he had faith in the Trustees, in his fellow faculty members, and most of all in himself. He was done with avoiding the unwanted task any longer. At last he felt himself equal to the job, and with the help of God, whom he so devoutly worshipped, he would undertake it.

In his inaugural address on August 10, 1858, Champlin said:

Knowing full well the history and condition of the College, I do not regard the office as a sinecure. Following a succession of able and learned men, I see nothing but labor and responsibility before me; and in these indeed I find my chief incitement. One learns that labor is less irksome than leisure, and responsibility is more inspiring than is quiet security. I welcome the labor, and hope to prove to the friends of the institution that I am its faithful servant. If Waterville College, in its present state of maturity, does not make reasonable progress in the future, it will be either from want of proper management here, or from want of cooperation and support among its friends. Let us hope that neither will be wanting, that the designs of Providence in planting this institution will not be frustrated.3

Champlin felt that, in the sixteen years since he had been connected with the College, due attention to one field had been slipping. Interestingly enough, his complaint did not concern his own field of the classics, but the quite unre- lated field of mathematics. In his inaugural he said,

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The idle clamor has been raised against mathematics as scholastic and unpractical, that it does not impart dexterities which can be turned to immediate account. But does it not lay the foundation for the useful arts? Ask the land surveyor, the navigator, the mechanician, where he got his art. But more than this, mathematics tends to emancipate the soul from sense, and thus give it that independence and freedom of movement which are essential to all fruitful thought, and hence to all useful art.

Have we, in our modern age of specialization, lost something of the broad humanism of those old-time scholars? It is hard to picture a modern classicist defending another field in these knowledgeable words, as did Champlin in 1858:

Mathematics is the science of quantity. It has to do with how much, whether in space, time, number, or degree. Pure mathematics is an ab- solute science, the development of the content of certain conceptions. Space and number do not necessarily suppose the existence of particu- lar things, but may represent merely a succession of like portions of pure space and time. Pythagoras taught that number was the generat- ing principle of all things, since it determined their form. Aside from its acknowledged usefulness in determining distances, times, forms, forces, and numbers, mathematics remains one of the great gymnastics by which the mind is trained to that superiority to sense so essential to all free, independent, and effective action.

Some of the students of the 1850's, long afterward recalling their college days, remembered Champlin as a Calvinist Baptist. Baptist he was-loyal and unyielding in his belief in immersion and his opposition to infant baptism, but that he shared Nathan Wood's views on predestination is doubtful. In his day Champlin was surely considered a Baptist liberal, or at least a middle-of-the-road man in respect to theology. In an address before the Society of Missionary In- quiry at Newton Theological Institution, less than a year before he was elected president at Waterville, he said:

With the dogmatist, religion is all theory and no practice, all law and no gospel. It becomes little more than a doctrine of God and redemp- tion as a scheme. Such a Christian shrinks from philanthropic efforts. He is too much concerned with belief to give any attention to works.

Only a year after his inaugural, Champlin launched vigorously into the joint financial campaign with Brown University, to which we have already referred. Articles of agreement were drawn up between Brown and Waterville College, whereby the two institutions sought jointly to raise $300,000 through the agency of Horace G. Love of Brooklyn, New York. The two colleges agreed to pay Love $2,000 a year and his expenses, and these costs were to be shared by the colleges in proportion to the funds collected for each. Subscribers were per- mitted to designate their gifts for either college, or give them to the fund for equal distribution between the two.

As was usually the case, the bait was again held out for scholarship dona- tions.

Not less than one-third of the whole amount paid is to be for founda- tion of scholarships, not to exceed $60 nor be less than $36 a year,

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for the benefit of worthy young men pursuing studies in said institu- tions, of which scholarships not less than one-half shall be for the benefit of sons of preachers of the gospel.

President Champlin's competent administration showed immediate results. When the Trustees held their annual meeting in August, 1860, the account showed a small surplus, for the first time in nearly a decade. Total income was $8,060 and total expenditures $7,578. The sources of income in that year, al- most a hundred years ago, are interesting. Somewhat more than half, $4,780, came from term bills. From securities, considered today to be the usual type of invested funds, came only $768. That amount was from three sources: Bangor City bonds, Canal Bank stock, and City of Portland scrip. In that last named item, which we would consider an oddity today, the College had invested enough to yield $448. In those days the College loaned money freely to individuals. While most such loans were eventually paid, the creditor often had to wait many years for both interest and principal, and there was seldom sufficient security to protect the loan. The treasurer's report for 1860 showed that $680 had come in as payments of principal on such loans, and $288 in interest. President Champlin had secured a legacy of $300 during the year and $40 had been col- lected in rent.

In 1859-60 the College spent very little apart from the direct expense of education. Of the $7,578 of total expense, $5,246 went for faculty salaries. Repairs, supplies, printing and miscellaneous items accounted for the second largest category, $923. Insurance and taxes cost $125, fuel $147, and allow- ances to students on term bills $173. Commencement and the various exhibi- tions throughout the college year cost nearly twice as much as all insurance and taxes, $247. All through the first sixty years of its existence the College paid taxes, strange as it may seem to us today. Not only were there taxes on houses which the College rented to faculty members, but in common with all non-profit institutions the College was subject to an occasional special tax levied by the State.

At their annual meeting in 1860, the Trustees showed their appreciation of the faculty's generosity by voting to devote to each man's department the interest on the four hundred dollars which he had paid into the campaign fund as a re- sult of his promise to subscribe $200 for each of two years provided his salary were raised by that amount.

All sorts of complications were already arising concerning the fund cam- paign. A prominent Rhode Island Baptist agreed to give $5,000 to set up five scholarships of a thousand dollars each, provided the interest therefrom, which went into the treasury each year toward the bills of five students, would then be used to increase the President's salary by three hundred dollars. A committee's consideration of that offer covered an entire page in the big record book of the Trustees. The committee pointed out that the donor's plan demanded the equiva- lent of a duplicate appropriation of the same funds.

It would compel the College to raise the President's salary and pay it from its own funds, and educate five scholars from the funds of the donor, or the College must educate the five scholars for nothing and use the donor's fund to raise the President's salary.

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The history of Colby College, Part 19

Author: Colby College Publication date: 1963 Publisher: Waterville, Colby College Press Number of Pages: 716

Author: Colby College
Publication date: 1963
Publisher: Waterville, Colby College Press
Number of Pages: 716