The history of Colby College, Part 4

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

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General Richardson was no man to accept such a decision without protest. In the spring of 1820 he wrote to the Moderator of the Board, Sylvanus Board- man, denouncing the decision made at the previous annual meeting and demanding a thorough investigation. His request was granted, and on August 16, 1820, an investigating committee made the following factual report, which, in General Richardson's absence, was unanimously adopted:

At a meeting held in Brunswick in February, 1818, after being agreed to petition the legislature of Massachusetts for aid to the Maine Literary and Theological Institution, it was understood by members present that, in case the application to the legislature should be unsuccessful at the spring session, before the winter session next ensuing a circular petition should be got up and distributed among the Baptist churches throughout the state, to obtain the signatures of their members and others in con- currence with the petition of the Board. In pursuance of this under- standing, several copies of a circular petition were presented to the Board at their meeting at Waterville in August, 1818, at which time the said petition was discussed. At the expiration of that discussion, since only one gentleman manifested an objection to the acceptance and distribution of the petitions, it was tacitly understood that they were accepted, and they were consequently distributed by members of the Board and others to whose charge they were committed.

PANGS OF BIRTH

All this being a result of conference and what was supposed to be mu- tual understanding and not formal resolve, was not therefore recorded. This circumstance has, in the opinion of your committee, given rise to different and conflicting opinions in two distinguished members of the Board. On one part, General King, embracing what he conceived to be the understanding of the Board, affirmed that the said circulars did originate and circulate by the Board's consent and authority. While on the other part, General Richardson, governing himself by what ap- peared upon the records of the Board, said that the circulars were gotten up and circulated without the Board's knowledge and consent.

Even after that impartial statement of the case, General Richardson was not willing to drop the matter. A year later he demanded that the Secretary of the Board send him a transcript of the vote passed at Litchfield in 1817. The Sec- retary complied and the General received the following transcript:

Litchfield, January 15, 1817

Voted to choose a committee of seven to prepare and forward a me- morial to the legislature, in order to obtain aid and an increase of the funds of the Institution, also prepare petitions and forward them to the Baptist societies.

In the original record the words "prepare petitions and forward to the Bap- tist churches" has been written between previously written lines, but whether that was done immediately or long afterward a modern reader cannot determine.

At the annual meeting in 1821, the Trustees voted to declare vacant the seat of General Alford Richardson, because of his continued absence from meet- ings. In his place they elected Josiah Seaver of South Berwick. The two generals continued at odds for several years but were eventually reconciled. In 1834 General Richardson again accepted a seat on the Board, where he worked in harmony with William King for the welfare of the College. But irreparable dam- age had already been done. If King's bill, appropriating four townships of land and $3000 a year, had been passed, it would have made a lot of difference. Long years of precarious existence on a starvation diet might have been avoided. But meanwhile a devoted, energetic, and persevering man had come upon the scene. In June, 1818, Jeremiah Chaplin had arrived in Waterville.

CHAPTER IV

Jeremiah The Prophet

E are so accustomed to thinking of prophecy as prediction of future events that we forget the original meaning of the word. A prophet is one who "speaks for." The biblical prophets were men who spoke for God, and Jeremiah Chaplin was a nineteenth century disciple of the great prophetic tradition. When he left the comfort of his Danvers parsonage to try a new venture in the wilder- ness of Maine, he heard that call as the voice of God. If God wanted Jeremiah to speak for Him in the forests along the Kennebec, Jeremiah was willing to go. But here was a double task. He must now speak not only for the Lord, but for that which he was sure the Lord, through devout Baptist ministers, had brought about-an educational institution far up in the Maine woods.

Jeremiah Chaplin was in the sixth generation of the Chaplin family in America. He was descended from Hugh Chaplin, who had come to this country from England in 1640, and had received a house lot in Rowley, Massachusetts, when Essex County was created in 1643. When he died in 1654, he left an estate appraised at 123 pounds, a considerable sum for those pioneer days. Hugh Chaplin was a freeman, which shows that he was a recognized communicant of a Puritan church of the standing order, and it was not until the time of his great- great-grandchildren that any of the family became Baptists. For that decision by Jeremiah's father, Asa Chaplin, a woman may have been responsible. This is the way Mittie Myers Chaplin tells the story:

Mary Bailey lived in Haverhill, several miles from Asa's home in George- town. Perhaps some of his boyhood friends were among the sons of fam- ilies who in 1754 had withdrawn from the parent Congregational Church in Georgetown and had established a church of the Baptist faith at Bradford, just across the Merrimac from Haverhill. In Haverhill it- self there was a militant Baptist church led by a talented young clergy- man, Rev. Hezekiah Smith. That church was especially attractive to the young people. Perhaps it was in such a group that Asa Chaplin first met Mary Bailey. Thus she may have been the opening wedge to his conversion to the Baptist faith.1

The personal conduct approved by the old Puritan regime was not at all mitigated for Asa Chaplin when he became a Baptist. He was a strict Sabba- tarian. For him the workday week ended at three o'clock on Saturday afternoon, so that the remainder of the day could be spent in preparation for the Sabbath, which ended at sundown on Sunday. Mrs. Mittie Chaplin tells that, when the

HISTORY OF COLBY COLLEGE

great preacher Whitefield came to Georgetown, the Congregationalist pastor tried to persuade Asa Chaplin to attend the service. Chaplin refused, saying he had no fault to find with his own minister.2

Such was the environment in which Jeremiah Chaplin spent the formative years of his life, following his birth on January 2, 1776, in Rowley, Massachu- setts. At the early age of ten he had made his profession of faith and had been baptized into his father's church. He continued to live at home, working on the farm, until he was nearly of age. Unlike many Baptist fathers of the time, Asa Chaplin was not averse to advanced education. Observing that Jeremiah loved books and was quick to learn, Asa approved of the lad's ambition to attend the only Baptist college in New England, Brown University at Providence. In 1799 Jeremiah received his Brown diploma, spent a year at the University as a tutor, then commenced theological studies with a noted Baptist divine, Dr. Thomas Baldwin of Boston. In 1802 he was called to be pastor of the Baptist Church at Danvers, not far from his birthplace. Jeremiah knew the place well. His father, with three other men from the Georgetown church, had assisted in the or- ganization of the Danvers church in 1793, and "Georgetown people had many acquaintances in Danvers as they journeyed through, going to Marblehead, where they sold mackerel kits or firkins to fishermen."3

Jeremiah Chaplin has been called one of the most learned theologians of his time. He was an original thinker and was said to express his thoughts with equal originality. His long sermons, expounding and defending biblical passages, were apparently so spirited that they held attention through long and wearisome arguments. Nevertheless his son-in-law is quoted as saying, "Unhappily he had not the advantages which grace of manners and finished oratory give to the public speaker, especially in the pulpit. Hence his life as a pastor, and the rich fruits of his piety and learning, were expended among small churches in rural districts."+

Although diligent search has failed to disclose any contemporary portrait of Jeremiah Chaplin, we do have a verbal description of the man. He was thin, spare and tall, with sharp, angular features and a penetrating eye. James Brooks said that he had "a rather sepulchral voice, which in his sermons and prayers went out in cadences that rose and fell with a singular effect upon the ear. He made perpendicular gestures with his right arm, keeping time to the changing cadences of his voice, without much reference to the subject matter of his discourse."

On April 16, 1806, Jeremiah married Marcia O'Brien of Newburyport, daughter of Captain John O'Brien, a distinguished naval officer in the Revolution who had participated in the first victory of the Continental Navy in the engage- ment off Machias. The young minister from Danvers, who was later to face boldly and unflinchingly many a difficult task away down east in Maine, seems to have been unusually shy with Marcia. Mrs. Mittie Chaplin tells us, "Upon meeting Miss O'Brien, Jeremiah felt that his life partner had been found. One Sunday evening he gave her a sealed envelope, telling her not to open it until the next day. It contained his proposal of marriage, which the young lady accepted.""

When the Trustees of the Maine Literary and Theological Institution first heard of Chaplin, he was already operating what the Institution's records refer to as "theological school at Danvers." Just what did that term mean?

In the early years of the nineteenth century, the most common method of preparation for the three learned professions of medicine, law and the ministry was to study with some licensed practitioner. A kind of apprenticeship, this method prevailed longer for young men seeking admission to the bar than it did in the two other professions. Yet, as late as 1847, Thomas Flint of Anson was

JEREMIAH THE PROPHET

learning medicine under Dr. Valorus Coolidge of Waterville when that notorious physician was arrested for the murder of young Edward Mathews. When the Maine Literary and Theological Institution was opened, organized theological schools were few, and any minister who had more than one young man studying with him at one time was said to be conducting a school. In the spring of 1818 Jeremiah Chaplin had seven such students living in the Danvers parsonage and subject to his instruction. For each of those students the Massachusetts Baptist Education Society paid Chaplin a modest fee, for which he had to supply board and lodging as well as instruction. Mrs. Chaplin did the students' washing and mending.

The fact that Chaplin had as many as seven students under his instruction may have had something to do with his nomination to the Maine trustees by the Education Society. Probably few other Baptist clergymen in Massachusetts were training more than one or two boys. A minister who had a good reputation for theological learning and who could supply seven ready-made students would give the new Institution a fine start.

On the June day in 1818, when Jeremiah and Marcia Chaplin left the old parsonage in Danvers for their venture in Maine, they had already become the parents of seven children. Two girls had died in infancy. Of the five survivors who were now on the way to Waterville, the oldest was John O'Brien Chaplin, aged eleven. His sister Hannah was nine, his brother Jeremiah Jr. was five, and his brother Adoniram Judson Chaplin, named for the famous Baptist missionary to Burma, was only two. The youngest of the family, a babe in Mrs. Chaplin's arms, was Anna Hesseltine Chaplin, who had been born only five months before the family left Danvers.

It has been said that Mrs. Chaplin kept a journal of the family's trip to Waterville. That is not strictly true. What she wrote was a long letter addressed to friends in the church back in Danvers. It was the kind of letter many women have written before and since her time, with parts of it written on different days, until the writer found a good chance to mail it. The letter did therefore turn out to be a kind of journal, for it was indeed a chronological account of the voyage by sloop from Boston to Augusta, by longboat up the Kennebec to Waterville, their reception in the town, and their first three weeks in Waterville. The full text of this letter has been placed in Appendix G.

Never for a moment did Jeremiah Chaplin forget that he was a minister of the gospel. Mrs. Chaplin recorded that he conducted services several times on the journey. The wife proved to be shrewdly adept at public relations. Meeting a boat that was coming down the river, and learning that the occupants lived in Winslow, across the river from Waterville, she "requested them to visit us on the Sabbath and invite their neighbors, as there would be preaching at Waterville, for we meant to have a meeting if Mr. Chaplin should be obliged to follow the example of the Apostle who preached in his own hired house."

The Chaplins had left Boston on June 20, 1818, on one of the numerous coasting sloops that claimed that city as its home port. For a time it was thought that the sloop that brought the Chaplins to Maine, since it bore the name Hero, was the same sloop from which Captain Palmer of Stonington, Connecticut, first sighted the Antarctic continent. It is now known, however, that there were sev- eral New England sloops named Hero, and that Palmer's was built on the Mystic River, while that which carried the Chaplins was built at Boston, and the two boats had quite different dimensions. When plans were made for the Miller Library on Mayflower Hill, more than a century after the Hero brought the Chap-

HISTORY OF COLBY COLLEGE

lins up the Kennebec, it was decided that an appropriate weather vane on that highest tower in Maine should be a replica of the sloop Hero. But what did that sloop look like? No one knew. Raymond Spinney, a graduate of Colby in the Class of 1921, had long been interested in antiquarian research in the Boston area. His diligent search of records and drawings at the Boston Custom House finally turned up a complete description of the sloop Hero, so that it was possible to make a bronze replica, six feet long, which now stands atop the tall tower of the Library on Mayflower Hill.

In the middle of the nineteenth century small vessels could sail up the Ken- nebec all the way to Waterville, because a canal around the dam at Augusta enabled them to get around the rapids at that town. But that canal had not been built when the Hero came up the river in the summer of 1818. That sloop could get to Augusta, but no farther. Mrs. Chaplin tells us, "Wednesday afternoon, about two o'clock, we left the place (Augusta) and took one of those longboats which are used on the Kennebec River, and which, being made with a booth in one end, are very convenient for the transportation of families as well as goods." The longboat was a long, low, flat-bottomed craft, square at both ends, steered by a long oar, and having a single tall mast with two or three square sails.6 Be- cause the wind on the river was highly undependable, these boats were often pulled along by oxen treading a towpath along the shore. That is what happened when the Chaplins took their journey. Mrs. Chaplin wrote, "Sometimes, when the wind was unfavorable, it was found necessary to go on shore and procure oxen, which standing on the water's edge with a rope fastened to them and to the boat, much assist its motion." But sometimes even the help of oxen was not enough, for Mrs. Chaplin says, "We went along with their assistance [the oxen's], but as the wind was several times weak, the men took the rope and helped us along."

When one can now enter an automobile at the State House and be at the Waterville post office in half an hour, it is difficult to comprehend the time it took to make that journey by longboat in 1818. Slow and tedious as it was, Mrs. Chaplin says it was preferable to the twenty mile journey over land. "We thought it would be more pleasant and less fatiguing than to go in a carriage."? When night overtook them, the Chaplins were three or four miles below Waterville, so they spent the night at a farmhouse. Mrs. Chaplin did not say whether it was on the Vassalboro or on the Sidney side of the river, but it was probably the former, because most of the longboats stopped at Getchells Corner. Setting out again early the next morning, they arrived in Waterville at ten o'clock. They had left Augusta at two o'clock on Wednesday; they reached Waterville at ten o'clock the next forenoon. That was the time consumed by a journey that now takes the traveler half an hour.

The eventful day when the man who was to become the first president of Waterville College arrived in town was June 25, 1818. Waterville citizens, anxious to see the new Institution launched in their town, greeted the Danvers family warmly. As Mrs. Chaplin recorded it, "Just before we reached the shore, we observed a number of gentlemen coming toward us. We soon found their object was to welcome us to Waterville." The Chaplins were taken at once to the home of the man who had led the movement to secure the institution for Wa- terville, Squire Timothy Boutelle. "Mrs. Boutelle met us at the door with as much freedom as though we had been previously acquainted."

Even a century and a half later, when ease of communication now leaves few isolated areas in our whole nation, people from other states have strange no- tions about the inhabitants of Maine. Citizens of the Pine Tree State are looked

JEREMIAH THE PROPHET

upon as woodsmen, watermen and hunters, as rather crude, unsophisticated in- dividuals unused to cultured ways. No wonder Mrs. Chaplin so pictured them before she came to Waterville. She was soon disillusioned. "They do not seem to be such ignorant, uncultivated beings as some have imagined. Many of those I have seen appear to be people of education and polished manners."

Waterville's Elmwood Hotel is now in the heart of the city's business section. On that site in 1818 stood the large frame house that had been built by James Wood. After Wood's death the house had been vacant for about a year when the Trustees rented it to accommodate Chaplin's family and his seven theological students. Mrs. Chaplin found that the Wood house was then situated in the suburbs. "Our house is rather retired from the thickest of the village although neighbors are quite handy."

Jeremiah Chaplin was more than a pious preacher and a conscientious teacher of young men bound for the ministry. He was a crusading Baptist, and he had been in Waterville less than two months when he organized, at a meeting in his home, the First Baptist Church of Waterville. He served that church as pastor or co-pastor for several years, and led it through the difficult task of erecting its own meetinghouse in 1826, the first to be built by any denomination in Water- ville. The only previous meetinghouse had been a community structure erected on the town common in 1798. It was open to the use of all denominations, and in it Chaplin himself had preached on his first Sunday in Waterville. All his life Jeremiah Chaplin considered it was his first duty to do the Lord's work.

The tall, spare, reverend gentleman in the Wood house was also a lover of books. Ten years before, in Danvers, he had helped organize a social library, and had set aside a room in the parsonage for its collection of books. On those shelves were not only volumes of religion and theology, but also Robinson Crusoe, Vicar of Wakefield, Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, and Don Quixote. A Danvers native, Samuel Page Fowler, wrote long afterward, "I well remember in my boy- hood how these solid authors stood in the pine bookcase off the minister's kitchen. They were all bound in sheep or calfskin, in a strong and durable manner that seemed to exhibit a character and respectability not seen in bindings of books of the present day."" Although Chaplin donated many books to the social library in Danvers, he retained a sizable personal collection, which he brought with him to Waterville. We know that, besides numerous volumes of sermons, he brought along Paley's Theology, Butler's Analogy of Religion, the Imitation of Christ, Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, Human Nature in its Fourfold State, Hannah Adams' popular volume on the world's religions, and Josephus' History of the Jews. Among his secular books were Parks' Travels in Africa, Goldsmith's History of the Earth, and a work on natural history called Animated Nature.

In respect to the use of alcoholic beverages Chaplin was well ahead of his time. Not only was liquor served liberally at the raising of the houses and barns, but it even accompanied the building of churches. When the minister called on a family, custom demanded that they offer him a stimulating drink. Chaplin had offended one of his Danvers deacons by refusing to partake of the man's prof- fered liquor. The deacon became so angry that he told Chaplin, if the latter did not drink the rum, the host would pour it down the minister's throat. According to Chaplin, he didn't take the drink and the threat was never carried out. In Waterville this Baptist preacher became at once the leader of a vigorous, but un- popular temperance movement. Although he left Waterville long before Neal Dow won his battle for Maine's prohibitory law in 1851, Chaplin did see in the community the organization of a thriving chapter of the Sons of Temperance.

HISTORY OF COLBY COLLEGE

Chaplin liked to take walks with his students along the bank of the Kenne- bec or out to the thriving new settlement of Ten Lots in the western part of the town. Tradition has it that the path along the river back of the first college build- ings became known as Meditation Lane.

From his published sermons it is clear that Chaplin was a Baptist of the stern Calvinist persuasion. As such, he appealed strongly to the predominant conservatism among Maine Baptists of that time. Although the doctrine of the Free Will Baptists was beginning to get a foothold east of the Piscataqua, Arminian beliefs which denied predestination were not countenanced by a majority of "the denomination stiled Baptists." Jeremiah Chaplin scorned what his fellow Bap- tists called the heresies of the Age of Reason, and he had no sympathy with the religious skepticism which characterized the period immediately after the Revo- lution. He habitually turned to the Bible for his thinking and directly to God for his inspiration. He had only contempt for the boasted pleasures of men.

Chaplin believed that Christian churches and Christian schools had a con- tinuing place in God's conflict with a very personal Devil. In his sermon at the ordination of his student, George Dana Boardman, as a "missionary to the heathen," preached at North Yarmouth on February 16, 1825, Chaplin said:

Many Christians appear to underrate the efforts which are likely to be made for the overthrow of the cause of Christ. They imagine that the conflict, which has so long been maintained between the church and her enemies, is nearly over, and that she has little more to do than take possession of her inheritance. That is a delusion. Many events have taken place, within a few years, that are calculated to arouse the Prince of Darkness and to excite him to his most vigorous exertions. Can we suppose that the season of millennial glory will be introduced without some desperate efforts on the part of Satan to prevent it? And in that conflict who are most likely to suffer? Who must expect to stand in the forefront of the battle? Must it not be those who by their missionary labors have contributed most to dispel the darkness which has so long covered the nations-the missionaries nurtured and sent out by our churches and institutions?9

Robert E. Pattison, who was president of the College from 1853 to 1857, did not meet Chaplin until the latter was more than fifty years of age. He did not know the first president during those active administrative years from 1818 to 1833. But usually men do not change greatly in essential character in the years from 25 to 40. Pattison said of the Chaplin he knew:

His first appearance impressed one with the idea of something unusual. He who had seen the man but once would not be likely to forget him. Though there was an absence of gracefulness, there was something in his tall, spare frame, broad shoulders and bony face, in his low but in- tellectually developed forehead above the small black, piercing eyes, which rarely failed to arrest attention. A natural impression, modified by a degree of awkward diffidence not less natural, but with a contempla- tive, meek and benevolent spirit, set him apart from his fellows. In spite of his personal modesty, he was susceptible of an ardor of feeling that reached full development in his zeal to build up this college. There was, in his case, none of that cold resolve of which some men are ca- pable, and by which they are sustained amidst all reverses and disap- pointments. Reverses hurt and scarred him. He felt intensely the

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The history of Colby College, Part 4

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