USA > New York > Oneida County > Clinton > A historical sketch of Hamilton College, Clinton, New York > Part 2
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"The vows Of God are on me, and I may not stop To play with shadows, or pluck earthly flowers Till I my work have done, and rendered up Account."
Hc accompanied two friendly Senecas to their tribe, which was the most westerly of the Six Nations. He knew that those nations were powerful, and in establishing missions among them he was following the examples of the early Apostles, who sought to preach the gospel in centers of influence. The Rev. Dr. Ellin- wood, in an address delivered at Clinton, thus made reference to the devout ardor of the young scholar: "It was in January, 1765, that Samuel Kirkland, a student, not yet twenty-four years old, left Johnstown and plunged into the wilderness. On that cold winter morning, one hundred and twenty-four years ago, he had a dreary journey before him. With his two Indian guides he was to travel two hundred miles, his feet shod with snow-shoes, and on his back a pack of forty pounds, his path the trail in the snow made by the feet of his dusky leaders. He carried the germ and poteney of Hamilton College. If the institution ever drifts from its Christian moorings, as some other colleges have, how unworthy will it be of its early history." No small part of the load which Kirkland and his guides carried in their knapsacks through the wilderness, consisted of choice treatises on Biblical learning.
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His first work was among the Senecas. Subsequently he dwelt among the Oneidas, whom he esteemed the noblest of the Iroquois confederacy. Near the present village of Oneida Castle was an Indian village known as Kanonwarohale. There Kirkland lived for a time. To the log-house which he built with his own hands he brought his bride, a niece of President Wheelock, of Dart- mouth. They journeyed by boat up the Mohawk river, and on horseback through the woods to Oneida, his wife on a pillion behind her husband. In this Indian village his two sons were born .. The Indians gave them high-sounding names. One of them, John Thornton Kirkland, afterwards became distinguished as President of Harvard College.
During the Revolutionary war Kirkland was for a time a Chap- lain in the American Army. It also fell to him to endeavor to . keep the Six Nations in a state of neutrality. After the war he resumed his missionary labor. A Cayuga chief, who had heard favorable reports of " the white priest and his Bible," came sixty miles to visit him. In 1788 when George Clinton was Governor, the State of New York united with the Oneida Indians in making a grant of valuable land in Oneida County to the Rev. Samuel Kirkland, in recognition of his faithful services. The tract was two miles square. The eastern boundary of this plot was the " Property Line," which, at its intersection with College Street, Clinton, has been marked by a granite shaft, erected by the class of '87. The north-east corner of the tract was just outside the limits of the present beautiful campus.
"THE CRADLE OF HAMILTON COLLEGE."
In 1789 Kirkland cleared a few acres and built a log-house. A year or two later, probably in 1791, he built a small frame house, seventeen feet by twenty-four. It contains one family room, with ample fire-place and three sleeping rooms. This was the first sample of " clapboard architecture " in the Kirkland patent. In this cottage door he sat, nearly a century ago, on Sabbath even- ings in the presence of his swarthy unconverted Bible class, some of whom had walked thirty miles to hear him. The cottage has been removed to the College Campus and is called "The Cradle of Hamilton College." It stands near the entrance to the College Cemetery, in which Kirkland sleeps awaiting the resur-
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rection of the dead. Prof. North in an address, thus refers to the historical cottage :
" After reading the record of Kirkland's life, one can see him serene and cheerful in the midst of dangers thickest on every side, with his faith in the power of the Gospel never weakened ; not when tried for his life on the charge of being a malignant sor- cerer, not when he sees a musket aimed at his heart by a skulk- ing savage, not when he wakes up in the morning to find a bloody tomahawk driven into the door of his cottage. One can see the patient missionary skilfully, prayerfully instructing those .blood. thirsty savages by word and example, in peaceful arts of planting and sowing and reaping, and grafting, and weaving, and building and reading and writing. One can see him astutely holding back those bloodhounds of war when they were eager to league with the forces of England to exterminate our infant settlements in . Central and Western New York.
In the still hours of the night, we can see him in his lonely cot- tage, writing long letters on religious topics to good men in Lon- don and Boston, and other long letters on political and educational matters to men highest in national and state authority-to Presi- dent Washington, to General Knox, to Alex. Hamilton, to Gen- eral Clinton. When weary with writing, one can see him kneel- ing by his bedside and gathering new strength where he taught his dusky disciples to find it by talking with the Great Spirit. One can see him in his family circle with his open Bible before him and his bright children about him, one of whom was to be the first wife of the greatest Bible scholar in America, another the mother of his gifted biographer, a third most eminent among the sons and Presidents of Harvard College. One can see the gracious simplicity that ennobled the hospitalities of his humble home, where he receives frequent calls from the Chieftan Schen- andoa, from James Dean, the fearless interpreter, from Kunker- pot, Onondego, Plattkopf, and Samson Occum, the Indian orators; and those most memorable visits from Gov. Clinton and Baron Steuben; from Timothy Dwight and Jeremiah Day, after their long vacation ride on horseback from Yale College. One can see him laying out and maturing his plans and large benefactions for a new seat of Christian learning that shall be to Central New York what Harvard and Yale and Dartmouth then were to New England. When one sees all this, and other kindred sights, as
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easy to be seen with fancy's eye, it will not be strange if that unpainted, weather-beaten cottage with its crumbling chimney and narrow windows, swells into a sacred pile, with something of the grandeur and hallowed inspirations of an old cathedral."
Years ago an aged resident of Clinton, Mrs. Eliza Bristol Lucas, now deceased, but the then "remaining link " between the present generation and that which first peopled the Oris- kany valley, said that in her girlhood she frequently saw the Indians of the Stockbridge and Oneida tribes go past her father's door, and file up the college-hill road, which was then only an Indian trail. She remembered well how strolling bands of the Indians used to come to her father's house at night-fall in winter, KIRKLAND COTTAGE, " The Cradle of Hamilton College." and ask leave to sleep on the kitchen floor. "If sober, their request was granted. They rolled themselves up in the blankets with their feet towards the fire of logs and after chatting awhile to one another at length dropped off into sleep. They always rose before day-break, and silently went on their way. She remembered seeing troops of Indians loitering around Dominie Kirkland's house, and sometimes sitting on the grass with him and his children. When Schen- andoa, the old chief, supposing his end was nigh, came over from Oneida to Clinton, in the hope that he might die there, he was carefully nursed by Mr. Kirkland and his family. Mrs. Lucas remembered one day seeing Miss Eliza Kirkland, (afterwards the wife of the Rev. Dr. Robinson, ) brush out Schenandoa's grey locks and bathe his almost sightless eyes."
. HAMILTON ONEIDA ACADEMY.
Kirkland died February 27th, 1808, four years before the College was chartered. At his funeral in the village church, an address by Rev. Dr. Asahel S. Norton, (Yale, 1790,) was interpreted to the
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Oneida Indians by James Dean, (Dartmouth, 1773.) Years previous to his death he began to mature plans for a system of schools for the education of Indians and white settlers. In a late number of "The Hamilton Review " is an excellent article on the history of the College. The accomplished under-graduate historian says : " Kirkland's plans included the establishment of primary schools in different places, and an academy, centrally located, for the more thorough education of pupils chosen from the primary schools. He visited Philadelphia and laid his plans before the public men there, among whom was Washington, who became deeply interested in the enterprise. The cooperation of the Governor of New York and the Regents of the University was secured, and a charter granted January 31st, 1793. Alexander Hamilton, the Secretary of the Treasury, and Colonel Pickering, then Post-Master General, furnished substantial aid, and the former was one of the trustees named in the petition for incorpo- ration. In honor of him it was called Hamilton Oneida Academy. Mr. Kirkland's efforts did not stop with securing the contributions of others, but he gave liberally of his own substance. In the Col lege Memorial Hall is the original subscription paper, at the head of which is the following : 'Samuel Kirkland, £10.0.0., and fifteen days work, also 300 acres of land for the use and benefit of the Academy to be leased, and the product applied towards the sup. port of an able instructor.' The gifts to the Academy were for the most part in labor and building materials ; but little money was given. Small as these amounts seem now, they represented a great deal of devotion and self sacrifice then."
The site selected for the Academy was on the present campus, between the Chapel and South College, near the " Property Line," which then separated the white settlements from the Indian Territory ; a suitable site, as the Academy was designed for both whites and Indians. "On a sunny and beautiful afternoon, July 1st, 1793, a brilliant and unusual procession moved up the hill. It was a cavalcade of horsemen and fair ladies. In front rode Mr. Kirkland and Major General Baron Frederick Willian de Steuben, the brave old warrior who had come in our country's hour of trial to discipline her rude soldiery. Near Kirkland and Steuben rode Mr. Kirkland's three daughters, all accomplished riders, together with citizens and invited guests. Their escort was a company of cavalry, well mounted, equipped and caparisoned. The comman-
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der was George Whitfield Kirkland. Among those mounted men were some who had mingled in the fight at Oriskany, or had seen Cornwallis surrender at Yorktown." Schenandoa the Indian Chief, was also present, his hair whitened with unmelting snows. With appropriate and impressive ceremonies Baron de Steuben laid the corner stone of the new edifice, and the Indian Chief assisted in the dedicatory ceremonies. Ninety-three years later the position of the corner stone was determined, and a handsome monument raised over the spot by the class of '86.
...
MIFESTÓN
HAMILTON ONEIDA ACADEMY.
By the time the foundations were laid and the frame raised the funds were exhausted. For two years it remained in this condi- tion, receiving the epithet, " Kirkland's Folly." " The foxes bur- rowed in its foundations, the birds built their nests beneath its rafters, and the squirrels, careering up and down the naked tim- bers, seemed to join in the general derision." But Kirkland was not to be discouraged. With characteristic push, he secured addi- tional funds, the building was enclosed, and a portion fitted up for the use of the school, which was opened in 1797. The building was ninety feet long, thirty-eight feet wide, and three stories high. The school once organized, its reputation was soon established, and pupils flocked in from the surrounding country to take advan- tage of the opportunities which it offered. "There is no evidence that any Indian youths were educated at the Academy. Their roaming, restless disposition* chafed under the restraints of school,
* The historian assigns as a reason for their not acquiring an Academic Education, "a roaming and restless disposition." Perhaps this should be received as an ex parte statement. Possibly they considered an Academic course as many to-day consider a College course-a useless and an expensive luxury. In the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin are found
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and the few whom Kirkland adopted into his own family before the Academy was opened were soon allowed to return to their tribes. Yet of the large number trained in his primary schools, a goodly proportion became intelligent and virtuous men. To this day their descendants, living in a Western State, revere and bless no name so much as that of Kirkland." One of the converts to Christianity under his ministry was Good Peter, an Oneida chief. One Sunday afternoon, when illness prevented Mr. Kirkland from finishing his sermon, he asked Good Peter to exhort the people. Peter arose and with much modesty began to address his coun- trymen upon the great goodness and mercy of God in sending his only Son to take upon Himself the form of sinful men, and to suffer and die for their redemption. After depicting the human life and character of Christ in various aspects, he said, " And yet he was the great God who created all things; He walked on earth with men, and had the form of man, but He was all the while the same Great Spirit; He had only thrown his blanket around Him."
Although the Oneidas did not avail themselves of the opportu- nities the Academy afforded them, they held Kirkland in grateful esteem. His beloved name is cherished not only by their descendants in the West, but by the remnant of the tribe which remains on the reservation near Clinton. Recently an Oneida in the Indian summer-camp at Saratoga Springs said to a Hamilton graduate, who fell into conversation with him, and spoke of Clin- ton, "We do not call that Clinton. We call it 'Gar-de-da-wis-
remarks about American Indians. He says, " Our laborious manner of life, compared with theirs, they esteem slavish, and base; and the learning on which we value ourselves they regard as frivolous and useless. An instance of this occurred at the treaty of Lancaster, in Pennsylvania, anno 1744, between the government of Virginia and the Six Nations. After the principal business was settled. the commissioners from Virginia acquainted the Indians by a speech, that. there was at Williamsburgh a college, with a fund for educating Indian youth ; and that, if the chiefs of the Six Nations would send down half a dozen of their sons to that college, the government would take care that they should be well provided for, and instructed in all the learning of the white people. It is one of the Indian rules of politeness not to answer a publie proposition the same day that it is made: they think thatit would be treating it as a light matter, and they show It respeet by taking time to consider it, as of a matter important. They therefore, deferred their answer till the day following, when their speaker began by expressing their deep sense of the kindness of the Virginia government, in making them that offer, . For we know,' says he, ' that you highly esteem the kind of learning taught in those colleges, and that the maintenance of our young men, while with you, would be very expensive to you. We are convinced, therefore, that you mean to do us good by your proposal ; and we thank you heartlly. But you whoare wise must know, that different nations have different conceptions of things : and you will therefore not take it amiss if our ideas of this kind of education happen not to be the same with yours. We have had some experience of it ; several of our young people were formerly brought up at colleges of the northern provinces ; they were instructed in all your sciences; but when they came back to us they were bad runners; ignorant of every means of living in the woods; unable to bear either cold or hunger: knew neither how to build a cabin, take a deer, or kill an enemy ; spoke our language imperfectly : were therefore neither fit for hunters, warriors or counselors; they were totally good for nothing. We are not, however, the less obliged by your kind offer, though we decline accepting it ; and to show our grateful sense of it, if the gentlemen of Vir- ginia will send us a dozen of their sons, we will take great care of their education, instruct them in all we know, and make men of them.'"
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la-ga.'" " What does that mean ?" said the Hamiltonian. He replied, " It means the place where the minister lives." Evidently the minister was to their fathers a human angel, and the place is fragrant with the odor of his sanctity. The red Oneida at Sara- toga, shaping his bows and arrows, referred also to Hamilton College, but not by that name. The Indians called it, " Yon-da- te-ei-on-ny-en-ni-ta-go," which means, "The Great School."
PRINCIPALS OF HAMILTON ONEIDA ACADEMY.
The first principal of the Hamilton Oneida Academy was John Niles. He remained there three years when failing health com- pelled him to withdraw. His associate, the Rev. James Murdock, was afterward called to the Chair of Languages in the University of Vermont, and later became Professor of Church History in Andover Theological Seminary. The Rev. Robert Porter held the principalship for four years, and on February 28th, was suc- ceeded by the Rev. Seth Norton, a thorough scholar, who was retained at the head until the Academy merged into the College. All of these men were graduates of Yale. Professor Norton was the author of both the words and the music of the familiar tune " Devonshire," beginning-"Ye servants of God, your Master proclaim."
GRAVES OF KIRKLAND AND SCHENANDOA.
In 1808, while Seth Norton was principal of the Academy, Kirkland died, lamented by every friend of education and Christi- anity. He had lived long enough to see the institution he planted enter upon its mission of wide usefulness. Pupils trained within its walls were going forth "to walk conspicuous in the world's light," to preach the gospel and to plead in courts of law. Schenandoa sank into the sleep of death on the 11th of May, 1816, aged about one hundred and ten years. The venerable Oneida, in the twilight of his life said, "I am an aged hemlock. The winds of a hundred winters have whistled through my branches. I am dead at the top." He requested that his grave might be made near Kirkland's. "Bury me beside my white father, so that I may cling to the skirts of his garments, and go up with him at the great resurrection."
Hamilton students standing in the doorway of the Kirkland Cottage see an Indian grave in the College Cemetery. Upon it
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the shadow of a motionless sentinel, Kirkland's monument, falls like a caress. The loving missionary of the cross and his dusky disciple sleep together. The winds that sweep over the old College halls touch the branches of the elms and poplars, as harp strings are touched, playing through the years requiems for those who rest. The fleecy flakes of four-score winters have softly descended upon their graves, and the leaves of sombre autumns have silently strewn themselves on the sacred sod. Showers of returning springs fall like tears, and still the Christian teacher and the converted chief sleep "the iron sleep." The bright beams of many summer suns have lain across their monuments and kissed the flowers upon their mounds, but Kirkland and Schenandoa do not wake.
"Sound asleep,
No sigh can reach them, For they dream the heavenly dream ; No to-morrow's silver speech Wakes them with an earthly theme ; Summer rains relentlessly Patter where their heads do lie, And the wild flower and the brake All their summer leisure take."
When the young scholar buried himself in the forests, his life might have been reckoned by the worldling as lost. But who ioses his life for Christ's sake shall find it again. On the resurrec- tion morning, when Kirkland shall rise from that hallowed grave to stand among the redeemed with his Indian disciples, and say, " Here am I and those thou hast given me," who knows but that mingled wonder and happiness shall be his, when it shall be revealed to him how a great host were fitted for life's work and worship in the Christian college he planted .. As he receives his. crown, radiant with many stars, will he not more fully comprehend the significance of that promise "Them that honor me, I will honor, saith the Lord?"
GEORGE BRISTOL AND MARK HOPKINS.
One of the students in Hamilton Oneida Academy was George Bristol, who continued his studies in Hamilton College and deliv- ered the valedictory oration at the first commencement. He studied law, but his health was so delicate that by the advice of his physician he gave up the practice of law and devoted himself to
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HAMILTON COLLEGE, CLINTON, N. Y.
agriculture. For one year he taught a classical school in Clinton. Among his pupils was Mark Hopkins, since widely known as the President of Williams College. It was he of whom President Garfield said, " Place Mark Hopkins at one end of a bench and a student at the other and you have a college." "God bless the dear old Doctor !" True it is, indeed, that neither stone nor tim- ber nor mastereraft of builders, but men, constitute a common- wealth or college. As the editor of the Alumniana, in the "Hamilton Literary Monthly," writes :
Ού λίθοι, ούδε ξύλα, ουδέ τέχνη τεκτόνων αί πόλεις είσιν, αλλ' όπουπερ αν ωσίν 'ΑΝΔΡΕΣ αυτούς σώζειν είδατες, ένταθα τείχη κα! πόλεις,
THE COLLEGE CHARTERED.
" As the demands upon Hamilton Oneida Academy grew, the necessity of increasing its facilities and enlarging its field of use- fulness became imperative. Its proximity to the "Old Seneca Turnpike," (a former Indian trail twelve or eighteen inches wide, and extending across the State, and later the main thoroughfare from Albany to Buffalo,) which passed through the present vil- lage of Kirkland, made it a convenient location for a college. A subscription was again opened to secure the endowment of a col- lege. It was necessary to raise Fifty Thousand Dollars in order to obtain a charter and secure an additional Fifty Thousand Dollars as a grant from the State. The work of soliciting subscriptions was committed to the Rev. Caleb Alexander, (Yale 1777,) who in a few months secured the necessary funds. The patroon of Albany, Stephen Van Rensselaer, headed the subscription with One Thousand Dollars, and Daniel T. Tompkins, the Governor of the State, and afterwards Vice-President of the United States, gave five hundred dollars. May 26th, 1812, the Regents of the Uni- versity granted a charter to Hamilton College. By direction of the Trustees the unfinished Academy building was completed and such additions made as the new institution required."
PRESIDENT BACKUS.
The College has had eight Presidents. The Rev. Dr. Azel Backus, an alumnus of Yale, presided from 1812 to 1816, the year
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of his death. He was inaugurated in the village church, December 3rd, 1812. Professor Seth Norton delivered on the occasion a Latin address. Dr. Backus was an earnest and eloquent preacher of the Gospel. His mental characteristics, for he was by turns pathetic and humorous, furnish evidence to support the theory that pathos and humor are " twin sisters." "The partition between tears and smiles is very thin." Twenty years ago, at an alumni meeting in New York City, an eminent graduate, Judge Charles P. Kirkland, LL. D., class of 1816, said : " Dr. Backus was a man of genius and of the most kindly feelings. He never preached to us without tears, nor censured a student without deep emotion. He disliked above all things attempts at 'fine writing,' and on one occasion, when one of my classmates read for his composition a colloquy brilliant with wit, as he supposed, the President's sole criticism was: "There's no Attic salt in that; nothing but shad brine. The author of that colloquy became a distinguished citizen of the state in which he resided." Perhaps it is the genial influence of good Dr. Backus, which has pervaded from the beginning those college halls, repeatedly awakening their echoes with genuine wit. Perchance one of the college poets was under the spell of that influence, when he wrote the
BACCHANAL BALLAD.
AIR-" LITORIA." I. Prex Backus was a jovial Prex, The roughest, kindest of his sex, His lips let fly full many a joke, And jests he woke that others spoke.
II.
One night he caught a Freshman tight, And helped him home with wrath and might : In other words a Freshman drunk He shouldered like a traveler's trunk.
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