USA > Maine > Kennebec County > Waterville > The history of Colby College > Part 69
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The family of the late Stephen Coburn have given the school from $3000 to $5000 annually to help meet the deficits. But even those gen- erous sums did not meet all expenses. It being evident that a crisis had been reached, the Coburn family offered to give $75,000 for endow- ment provided other friends of the school would raise another $75,000 for additional endowment and the construction of dormitories.5
Higgins had met with the loss of its dormitory by fire in January, 1914. Only $6000 was recovered from insurance, and $25,000 was needed to restore the building. The situation at Ricker, said the committee, remained about as it had been in 1901; namely with a debt to the College gradually being reduced from income.
The committee arranged for a meeting with representatives of the four schools, after which they reported:
It was the unanimous opinion that the relations between the several schools and the College had been allowed to become less close than they should, and that a radical change in this respect should be ef- fected. No one need be blamed for the present situation, but all present expressed the earnest wish that a stronger feeling of cooperation and mutual helpfulness be aroused.
This writer taught at Hebron from 1913 to 1921, and he knows that during those years it became increasingly difficult to interest students, especially boys, in Colby. Hebron boys, many of whom had long turned to Bowdoin, were now seeking admission to Dartmouth, Amherst and Williams. Fewer of them were
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THE ACADEMIES
inclined to apply at any coeducational college. Meanwhile the trustees of the academies came to consider their schools as quite independent, except for the somewhat tenuous financial ties.
That the time-honored relations were respected and valued, but that changed conditions should not be ignored was stated in the report made to the Trustees in November, 1928, by the chairman of the Executive Committee, administering the College until the election of a president. Professor Marriner, the committee chairman, then reported:
We are not forgetting the close relation that has long been maintained between the College and its four affiliated preparatory schools. Of course everyone is aware that the function of those schools has broadened and that the apron strings have all but been severed. They no longer prepare students almost exclusively for Colby. Such a situation is not only the inevitable result of changing educational conditions in Maine, but it is also better for both the colleges and the schools.
In 1925 the Board of Education of the Northern Baptist Convention sug- gested to Colby College and to the Baptists of Maine that they combine their secondary schools into not more than three institutions, and preferably only two. A joint commission representing both Colby and the Maine Baptist Convention considered the proposal and submitted an exhaustive questionnaire to each of the four Colby schools. The replies disclosed the following facts. The real estate of the four schools was valued at $700,000, their total endowments at $720,000, more than a third of which was held by Hebron. Expenditures were balanced by receipts at Hebron and Higgins, but not at Coburn and Ricker. To the four schools, in 1924-25, came pupils from 194 towns. The total enrollment was 618. Not one student admitted to college from any of these schools in 1923 had failed. All four academies were managed by independent boards of trustees, Coburn having returned to that status nearly a quarter of a century earlier. For the most part students came from towns that did not maintain high schools; in fact such towns paid more than $20,000 a year for the tuition of their pupils at the acad- emies.
The Colby Trustees therefore refused to consider severing their relations with any of the four academies.
When Franklin Johnson came to the Colby presidency he did everything pos- sible to cement relations with the academies. Having himself been a highly suc- cessful principal of Coburn, he knew the potential value of that school to the College. He saw to it that all of the schools were regularly visited by college representatives and that attempts to enroll their graduates in the College were vigorously pursued. But it was too late. As the Executive Committee had clearly pointed out in 1928, none of the schools, with the possible exception of Coburn, considered that it any longer had peculiar relations to Colby. Hebron had become a boys' school; Ricker had expanded into a junior college, soon to become a four-year college; and the majority of college-bound Higgins graduates were going to the University of Maine. Because of its location, Coburn still had close ties with the College, but in spite of the intense loyalty of its Colby principal less than half the college entrants in each graduating class now came to Colby.
By the end of the Second World War the schools had begun to clamor for re- lease of their funds held by the College. Fire at Higgins had justified the release
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HISTORY OF COLBY COLLEGE
of certain funds, and even though the Coburn funds had been built up substan- tially from their low point of $15,000 in 1914, inroads had again been made into the capital to pay off mounting annual deficits. In 1951 the College held only $27,315 for Coburn, $63,600 for Hebron, and $1,079 for Higgins. In response to a request from the Ricker Trustees, the remainder of their fund, amounting to slightly more than $19,000 had been turned over to them in 1946.
Colby's financial relation with the academies ended on June 30, 1956, when the Treasurer reported: "During the year all investments of academy funds were returned to the academies, as authorized by the provisions of Chapter 113 of the Private and Special Laws of Maine, 1955."
At first blush, the reader may conclude that Colby's attempt to secure and maintain affiliation with certain academies was a mistake, that President White was right when he strongly implied that the energy expended upon that project could better have been turned to increasing the college resources. That conclu- sion would be too hastily drawn. The long history of the affiliation reveals that, despite its liabilities, it had definite and valuable assets. It is indeed possible that, without the close relations with those schools, the College itself might have been obliged to close its doors. The four academies were all boarding schools where many students lived in dormitories, thus acquainting them, as no high school student could be acquainted, with living conditions at college. Because the academies drew their students from many towns, they gave the sponsoring col- lege an indirect contact with families in those towns. Finally, because both the College and the four schools were Baptist institutions, they had a common ground for denominational aid.
That, after 1900, the academies became less important to the College was not entirely the fault of either party. The result can be partially attributed to the changing times. Public high schools increased so rapidly that they replaced or absorbed many of the old academies. Quality of work in the high schools improved so much that it became less necessary for a boy or girl to attend a clas- sical institute in order to prepare for college. As the high schools drew more and more students away from the academies, the latter found it increasingly difficult to sustain adequate enrollment, and the inevitable result of the pressure for num- bers was a lowering of standards. The public was losing confidence in the academies as superior institutions of learning. Financially the academies faced a dilemma. If they did not substantially raise tuition and boarding fees, they could not secure competent teachers in competition with the public schools; if they raised fees too high, they would price themselves out of the market.
The interesting fact is that, even as late as 1960, not one of the four schools had gone out of existence, but three of them had changed their essential char- acter. Hebron had become a nationally known school for boys, with superior instruction, and high rates. Ricker had expanded into a college. Coburn, after the disastrous fire of 1955, had given up its boarding department and all of its programs except the college preparatory course, and had become a private day school. Only Higgins remained a boarding school, in a rural setting, drawing most of its students from nearby towns. Colby graduates presided at two of the schools, and the College maintained the most cordial relations with all of them. The day had long gone by when Colby needed to depend upon its four former "feeders" for students, but, in 1960 as in 1900, the College gladly wel- comed the kind of boys and girls that those fine schools persistently trained, and indeed the College often wished it could have more like them.
CHAPTER XLVII
Colby In Three Wars
T HE effect that three major wars had upon the College has been recounted in previous chapters. What was Colby's contribution to those wars? That is the subject of the present chapter.
Colby's beginning came too late for the War of 1812; in fact it was that con- flict which delayed the start of the institution. The College was in operation, under President David Sheldon, during the War with Mexico, but there is no evidence that any Colby men participated in that conflict. It was not until 1861, therefore, that Colby made its first contribution on the nation's battlefields.
THE CIVIL WAR
Between 1820 and 1865 a total of 990 men had attended Waterville Col- lege. Of that number 228 had died. Of the remaining 742 men, 168 enlisted in the Civil War. Almost exactly half of those men, to the number of 86, were commissioned officers. Three were major generals: Benjamin F. Butler of the Class of 1838, Charles Henry Smith, 1856, and Harris M. Plaisted, 1853; three held the rank of Brigadier General: Russell B. Shepherd, 1857, William K. Bald- win, 1855, and Charles P. Baldwin, 1858. Eight Colby men were colonels, five were lieutenant colonels, eight were majors, twenty were captains and sixteen were lieutenants. Fourteen others held commissions in the medical corps and nine were commissioned chaplains. Classes represented ranged from 1830 to 1869, and on Colby's list of Civil War veterans are the names of ten men who actually did not attend the College until the war was over. The names, ranks, and service assignments of those 168 Colby men who served in the war will be found on pages 83 to 90 of Dr. Whittemore's History of Colby College (1927).
Twenty-six Colby men laid down their lives for the Union cause. The date after each name is the college class.
George Bassett, 1862 Amasa Bigelow, 1862 Stephen Boothby, 1857 Leonard Butler, 1865 Thomas Clark, 1855 John Drake, 1857 Samuel Dyer, 1862 Samuel Fifield, 1860 George Getchell, 1863 John Goldthwaite, 1860
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HISTORY OF COLBY COLLEGE
William Heath, 1855
Asher Hinds, 1863 Samuel Keene, 1856 Weston Keene, 1865 George Knox, 1840 Arch Leavitt, 1862 William Merrill, 1862
William Nixon, 1865 Valentine Oakes, 1853 William Parker, 1858
Francis Perkins, 1865 Edward Stearns, 1864 Edwin Stevens, 1863
William Stevens, 1862
William Tucker, 1851 William West, 1860
A hundred years after the Civil War, the fighting unit in that conflict which Colby men remember best is the Twentieth Maine, because of the celebrated history of that regiment published in 1957 by a Colby graduate, John J. Pullen, 1935. Six Colby men served in that famous regiment commanded by General Joshua Chamberlain. Samuel T. Keene, 1856, survived the ordeal at Gettysburg, but fell in the battle of Petersburg in 1864. Weston H. Keene, 1865, was killed in the battle of Weldon in 1864; and George C. Getchell, 1862, remaining on army duty in the months after Lee's surrender, died of yellow fever in New Orleans in 1866. Thus three Colby men who served in the Twentieth Maine were war casualties. The three survivors were Joseph A. Ross, 1856; Henry Merriam, 1864; and William Libbey, who did not receive his degree until 1874.
One Colby casualty in the war was not a member of the Union forces. Lo- renzo A. Smith, a Vermonter, had graduated from Waterville College in 1850, had first gone out to Ohio as a teacher, then pursued that vocation for two years in Mississippi and Arkansas. In 1854 he settled on an Arkansas farm and com- bined agriculture with teaching. When war came, Smith's sympathies were with the North, but in 1864 the Confederate draft caught up with him and he was forced into the Southern army. He died in service a few months after his in- duction.
Two Colby graduates made the army their professional career after the war. Henry Clay Merriam entered the College from Houlton in 1860. When, in the spring of 1862, President Lincoln called for 300,000 volunteers, com- panies were enthusiastically organized in Maine towns. Such a company was formed by Henry Merriam in Houlton, and as its captain he saw it later at- tached to the Twentieth Maine. Of the taking of such companies into the regi- ment which came under the command of General Chamberlain at Gettysburg, Pullen says:
. The 20th Maine was the last of the three-year regiments raised in Maine in response to the President's call in July, 1862. Apparently it was formed from detachments originally enlisted in the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th regiments, and afterward found to be unnecessary to complete those organizations. The 'leftovers' came from scattered localities: Company B from a big woods county, Piscataquis; Company H from Aroostook, from which it was a hundred-mile trip by stagecoach before the railroad was reached at Bangor.1
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COLBY IN THREE WARS
After Gettysburg, Merriam was attached to the 80th U. S. Volunteers, still in the rank of captain. Promoted to lieutenant colonel, he commanded the 73rd and the 85th U. S. regiments in 1864-65, and at the end of the war was made a Brevet Colonel. He decided to remain in the service, taking the regular rank of major in the 38th U. S. Infantry in 1866. He soon rose to lieutenant colonel in the period of the Indian uprisings in the West, and was made a full colonel in 1885. Two years later he became a brigadier general, and at the outbreak of the Spanish War in 1898, Merriam reached his final promotion to Major General, U. S. Volunteers. He died in Portland in 1912, at the age of 75.
The other Colby man to become a professional soldier as a result of the Civil War was Charles Henry Smith, 1856. We have more information about General Smith than we have about General Merriam, thanks to the general's daughter, Mary Livermore Dunlap, whose will bequeathed to Colby College the correspondence and papers of her father, extending from 1861 to 1891. Mrs. Dunlap's bequest also included a portrait of General Smith; medals awarded to him; three swords, scabbards, and belts, a framed citation of his membership in the Legion of Honor, and a package containing epaulets, buttons, and other in- signia.
Charles H. Smith was a York County native, born in Hollis in 1827. En- tering college older than most of his classmates, he received his degree in 1856, and immediately became principal of the new high school at Eastport. There, in 1861, he recruited and became captain of Company D, First Maine Cavalry. Made a major in the unit in February, 1863, his promotion was rapid, for by March he was a lieutenant colonel and before the end of June a full colonel. He commanded that cavalry unit at Gettysburg. In August, 1864, he became Brevet Brigadier General of U. S. Volunteers, and in March, 1865, a Major General. All brevet ranks were temporary, and in August, 1865, Smith was mustered out of the service with permanent rank of Colonel of First Maine Cavalry.
Returning to Eastport, Smith began the practice of law, was a member of the Maine Senate in 1866, and served as Colonel and special aide on the staff of Gov- ernor Chamberlain, for by that time the hero of Gettysburg had been elected chief executive of Maine.
Apparently army life had appealed to Charles Henry Smith, because in July, 1866, he left the peaceful pursuits of law in Eastport and attendance upon the Governor at Augusta, and accepted a commission as Colonel of the 28th U. S. Infantry, Regular Army. In less than eight months he had risen to the rank of Major General.
General Smith had a lively experience in command of the District of Ar- kansas, whose settlers were determined to move into the Indian Territory, con- trary to treaty agreements. It was Smith's job to keep the squatters out and do it, if possible, without bloodshed. He was so successful that he was transferred to take command, in 1872, of all troops around New Orleans, and he was there through the period of the bloody reconstruction riots. In 1879 he was back in the West, repelling Kansas settlers from invading the Indian Territory.
General Smith retired from active duty in the U. S. Army in 1891, and in 1895 he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. He died in Wash- ington on July 18, 1902. In Arlington, amid America's other great and honored dead, lies the body of Charles Henry Smith, Colby, 1856.
No account of Colby's part in the Civil War would be complete without reference to two Waterville brothers, William and Francis Heath. A recruiting
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HISTORY OF COLBY COLLEGE
office had been opened on the second floor of the Plaisted block by the Heath brothers a few weeks after the attack on Fort Sumter, and those boys were them- selves the first to enlist. William had already enjoyed an adventurous career. In 1849, at the age of fifteen, he had accompanied his father across the country to the gold fields of California by covered wagon. In San Francisco William had eluded his father and shipped off for Hong Kong. After thrilling adventures in China, Malaysia, Indonesia, and on the Island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, William had sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and across the Atlantic to his Maine home, more than two years after he had left it. Between his sixteenth and his eighteenth birthdays William Heath had been completely around the world. Back in Maine he settled down to academic life and graduated from Waterville College in 1855.
William's brother Francis had attended the College only one year (1854-55) and had then gone to work in one of the many enterprises controlled by his lawyer father, Solyman Heath. When he joined with William to recruit a military com- pany in 1861, he was just as eager as was his adventurous brother to punish the rebellious Southerners. In a few days their company had been filled and were drilling in the Waterville streets. After a brief encampment at the state's mus- tering center in Augusta, they were accepted into the federal service as Company H of the Third Maine Infantry, with William Heath as captain and his brother Francis as first lieutenant.
On July 21, 1861, the company received its baptism of fire at Bull Run. By 1863 Francis Heath was a full colonel, in command of the 19th Maine. After the war he served in both branches of the Maine Legislature, entered the paper products business, and served as Treasurer of both the Kennebec Fibre Company and the Somerset Fibre Company until his death in 1897. William Heath served as Captain of the Third Maine, then was Lieutenant Colonel of the Fifth Maine when he was killed at the battle of Gaines Mill on June 27, 1862. The Water- ville post of the Grand Army of the Republic was named in his honor.
One of several Colby men taken prisoner during the war was Charles A. Hendrickson, 1864. Captured at Bull Run, he spent nearly a year in Libby and Salisbury prisons, but in 1863 he was exchanged and returned to his Water- ville home. He immediately enlisted in the Navy and was promoted to ensign. He miraculously escaped without a scratch when a 15-inch gun on the monitor Saugus blew up, wounding every man aboard except Hendrickson.
Colby's most celebrated Civil War figure was, of course, Major General Ben- jamin Franklin Butler, 1838. His story has been told rather fully in an earlier chapter. Whatever one may think of his political machinations, historians are agreed that Ben Butler was a military genius. To win that terrible war the Union certainly needed a few military geniuses, and it is well for Colby graduates to remember that among the alumni of the little college in Waterville there was such a man.
FIRST WORLD WAR
The Spanish-American War of 1898 was too short to call many Colby men into service. It was therefore half a century after the close of the great conflict over slavery before large numbers of Colby students and alumni were again heed- ing the call to battle. The effect of that war upon the College, the coming of the SATC, the ravages of influenza, and influences upon the curriculum have already been told. As we have done concerning the Civil War, let us now see what was Colby's contribution to the first world conflict.
539
COLBY IN THREE WARS
When College opened in the fall of 1917 the Alumnus proudly pointed to what had already happened.
It will be a source of satisfaction to the graduates and friends of the College to learn that nearly 200 students and alumni have given them- selves over to the Government in order to help win the world war for democracy. Colby's part in the Great War will make a page in her history to which succeeding generations of students will turn for their best inspirations.2
Already the 103rd Maine Regiment had claimed a number of Colby men. Spaulding Bisbee, 1913, was Captain of Company B, and Raymond Rogers, 1917, was a lieutenant in Company H. Many students and young alumni had hurried off to Officers Training Camp at Plattsburg, while an even larger number had enlisted in the ranks. A few men, including C. H. Piebes, 1918, were in that strange new organization, the Aviation Corps.
The true historian of Colby in World War I is Dr. Herbert C. Libby, not only because he was at that time editor of the Alumnus, but even more because of the voluminous personal correspondence which he carried on with Colby boys in the service. He reported that a total of 645 men served in some capacity during the war. On active duty were 484; in reserve in SATC were 124; and serving with Red Cross, YMCA or other organizations at the front were 37. To the armed services Colby furnished one brigadier general, Herbert M. Lord, 1884; three colonels, two lieutenant colonels, four majors, and nineteen captains. Several Colby men were decorated with service medals or with the French Croix de Guerre.
The names of Colby men who served in the First World War will be found on pages 149 to 159 of Dr. Whittemore's History of Colby College.
Eighteen of Colby's sons lost their lives in conflict. First to die was a mem- ber of the Canadian forces, Murray Morgan, 1915, who was killed in battle nearly a year before the United States declared war. The first Colby man to die in the American service was George G. Watson, 1917, who fell on December 29th of his graduation year. The names of the immortal eighteen are:
Elvin L. Allen, 1901 Joseph A. Besse, 1919 Raymond H. Blades, 1922 Carleton M. Bliss, 1918 George N. Bourque, 1918 Henry L. Curtis, 1912 Henry L. Eddy, 1917 Herbert H. Fletcher, 1919 Hugh Kelley, 1921 Murray A. Morgan, 1915
Norman J. Merrill, 1914 Henry B. Pratt, 1918 Charles A. Sturtevant, 1897 John A. Stowell, 1918 Harold B. Taft, 1916 Edward E. Washburn, 1912 George G. Watson, 1917 William A. Weeden, 1912
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HISTORY OF COLBY COLLEGE
In the Alumnus, Professor Libby made appropriate comparison between World War I and the Civil War when he wrote:
The fellow soldiers of George Bourque have organized themselves into a post and have taken the name of the George N. Bourque Post of the American Legion. No finer tribute could be paid to a gallant soldier whose heroism in the midst of danger was little less than phenomenal. Thus the two army posts in Waterville are named for two brave Colby men-William S. Heath, 1855, killed at Gaines Mill, Virginia, and George N. Bourque, 1918, who died at Toul, France. Heath died at the age of 28; Bourque at the age of 24.3
Bourque received posthumous citation from General Edwards of the Yan- kee Division and to his family General Pershing sent a personal letter of sym- pathy. A signal honor was conferred upon Spaulding Bisbee, 1913, when the King of Italy made him a chevalier of the Order of the Crown of Italy. Not all the honored men were of the combat troops. One of the oldest Colby men in service, a YMCA worker, Archer Palmer of the Class of 1880, was awarded the Croix de Guerre for distinguished bravery in ministering to men at the front.
Between 1917 and 1920, Professor Libby wrote for the Alumnus eight con- tinued installments of what he entitled "Colby in the Great War." Would there were space to publish all of that record here! It is well to know that it is safely enshrined in the bound volumes of the Alumnus, carefully preserved in the Col- biana collection of the Colby College Library.
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