USA > Ohio > Portage County > Hiram > Alumni directory of Hiram College, 1850-1925 > Part 34
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partaking in the least degree of sectarian character." What the fathers established was clearly a religious school rather than a school of religion.
At the close of six years of service as the first principal of the Institution, Amos Sutton Hayden, whose "fortunate choice of teachers," "honorable character" and "wide acquaintance as preacher and educator" (as Green's History notes) "greatly enlarged the horizon of the Institution," said in his farewell, among other things, "It is a leading object of the Institute to impart thorough instruction in the elementary branches of an English education;" but, in addition thereto, "Few colleges in the West cultivate more successfully the study of the classics," and it is the purpose of the Eclectic "to secure the inestimable advantages of a correct education by a due and proportionate attention to all its departments." Then he adds: "A distinguishing feature of the Eclectic Institute is the morning lecture on Sacred History."
During the succeeding administration a great variety of other subjects was admitted into the scope of the morning lectures, without at all impairing the religious reactions of the students. In 1858, however, a serious attempt was made, though never consummated, to convert the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute into an avowed "Theological Seminary." Some thirty years later, too, the College for a short time offered what were styled ministerial courses, not however leading to divinity degrees nor differing, except in the ratio of Biblical to secular studies, from other collegiate courses.
Cultivating always the Christian spirit and proud of her children who adorn the Christian ministry at home and abroad, and equally of those who in other vocations have reflected honor upon their Alma Mater, the Institution, as academy and college, has pretty consistently adhered to the objective defined by her original charter and elaborated in her first announcement. Her sons and daughters, in about the same proportions as those of other colleges, may be found in the various callings requiring educated service and leadership which constitute the life of the community and which can never be supplied in excess of the imperative and continual demand for highly trained men and women.
Disciples have at all times predominated in Hiram's Board of Trustees, her faculty, her student body and in the number (though perhaps not in the aggregate amount of gifts) of her supporters. This condition, altogether natural and fitting, results from no restrictions, either tacit or express, and the college, in being non-sectarian, conforms to the express will of its founders as it also conforms in its policies generally to accepted academic standards.
Aside from the state universities, nearly every college in the United States rested originally on a sectarian basis or started from a religious motive. Relatively few of them are now subject to denominational control or other religious restraint. Yet the religious life of the colleges generally, and of Hiram in particular, has been at least as consistently maintained as that of the population at large. In Hiram, moreover, questions of the freedom of teaching and of the conflict between fundamentalism and modernism have created no controversies, because, within the first ten years of the Institution's career, these problems here found, once and for all, their proper solution, namely, that there can be no essential conflict between religion and science. In 1857 the Garfield-Denton debate in Chagrin Falls awakened the widest possible public interest throughout this region. Nearly every prominent Disciple in the Western Reserve listened to some of the speeches on both sides. Those pious men were quite amazed and almost dismayed when their protagonist accepted as true the geological and other scientific premises of his opponent's argument against the received Biblical teachings about the creation. But, after the splendid and triumphant reconciliation then made of Christian faith and scientific truth, they could never again be cajoled into jousts with windmills in the fashion now revived in Tennessee.
Perhaps enough has been prefaced concerning the character and scope of the Institution itself, so that we may now properly proceed to inquire by what and by what man- ner of people its establishment and policies were conceived and executed. Biography, it has often been observed, is the essence of history. So, an institution derives its his- torical identity and character from the lives of its builders.
Like other schools and colleges, Hiram through all the years has enlisted the aid of many notable and inspiring
teachers. But there is one period of her early history, the quinquennium beginning with the autumn of 1856 and ending in 1861, which is justly styled the Golden Age of the Eclectic, and of which it may be said, with literal and exact truth, that no other institution, at a like stage of its exist- ence, ever attracted to its faculty a rarer teaching group. This group, headed by James A. Garfield, fresh from Wil- liams College, included Norman Dunshee-succeeded in 1858 by John M. Atwater, afterwards principal of the Eclectic and still later president of the College-H. W. Everest, J. H. Rhodes and Almeda A. Booth.
To the same choice company, and partaker of its spirit, belongs also Burke A. Hinsdale, who, though then but a student and tutor, became afterward a regular teacher in the Eclectic and again in the College, and from 1870 to 1882 its president. Two of the members of President Hinsdale's faculty have ever since his day kept faithful vigil, at this temple of the Hiram spirit, whose tutelary insignia passed first from the founders to Garfield and Miss Booth; from them to Hinsdale; and by him, in turn, as in an apostolic succession, handed on to the elect of our day, represented here by these two beloved teachers, Professors Colton and Peckham.
I would fain have descanted today upon the life, char- acter and service to this Institution of each of the outstand- ing score or more in the long roll of Hiram's founders and benefactors, incorporators and trustees, administrators and teachers, including especially those who forty years ago were my teachers, those others who became pillars in the administration of President Zollars, inaugurated on my graduation day in 1888, and those who, under the great leadership of President Bates, make up his scholarly faculty and loyal constituency and who have witnessed and furthered the unprecedented advances which he has already achieved in the dignifying and standardizing, as well as in the ampler financing, of the College.
None will deem it invidious, however, if, from that unbroken succession before mentioned, I summon to our grateful and loving commemoration the great triumvirate at whose hands, in largest part, the noble character of this Institution, first as a seminary of learning and then as a
college, was early shaped and firmly fixed. It is quite superfluous to identify those whom I mean, by repeating the names of Garfield, Booth and Hinsdale; for the pre- eminence of these as master builders of the Hiram edifice is universally acknowledged.
The earliest of these to teach here was Miss Booth. When she responded to the call of Principal Hayden to join his little corps of instructors, the first year of the Eclectic had run hardly half its course. From that time until 1866, fifteen years in all, not counting the one-year leave of absence which enabled her to graduate from Oberlin in 1855, she continued her incomparable service in this place. Those splendid formal eulogies of her which were made at different times by General Garfield and by that eminent lawyer, the late Virgil P. Kline, might well seem partial or extravagant to anyone who never knew her or them. But from all of many different sources, the unvarying testimony of those qualified to speak, fully confirms the former's deliberately published estimate of her "as one of the very foremost teachers of her time." In the same formal address, delivered here in 1876, Garfield adds: "From long associa- tion in her studies, and comparing her with all the students I have known, here and elsewhere, I do not hesitate to say that I have never known one who grasped with greater power, and handled with more ease and thoroughness, all the studies of the college course. I doubt if in all these respects I have ever known one who was her equal."
Eight years the senior of Garfield, and preceding him by more than a year within the walls of the Eclectic Insti- tute, she taught here throughout the period during which he was one of its students. He never recited to her in the classroom, but they began soon to work together in private preparation for advanced college standing. She was admitted to Oberlin College as a senior in 1854, at about the same time that he entered Williams College as a junior. In the next two years they each in course received the degree of bachelor of arts, and straightway returned to teach in Hiram.
After Principal Hayden's voluntary retirement, Garfield was at once, mainly through her influence, chosen by his fellow teachers to head the school, and in the following year
the trustees confirmed their action by electing him principal. Under the guiding genius of these two great teachers, always ably supported by their colleagues whom I have named, their five years of collaboration stamped Hiram with that rate character of combined brilliancy and solidity which those who felt its enchantment and knew its enduring worth have taken care shall never be effaced.
Not even the devastating convulsion of Civil War that wrested from Hiram not only Garfield, but the strength of the young manhood that sat at his feet, could wholly destroy the structure which under such inspiring leadership had been erected here. Throughout that conflict, whose anxieties and bereavements distressed the people of this country more deeply than those of the World War, Miss Booth remained at her post in Hiram, and after the return of peace she continued here until the equipoise of the school was in some measure re-established and the call of filial duty bade her leave.
Three years before her resignation the trustees affirmed "that in the person of Miss Almeda A. Booth the Institution has a teacher whose wisdom and experience fit her to hold, under any and all arrangements, a large control in the affairs and government of the school." From the beginning to the end of her long service, her unflagging energy of mind and body generated much of the motive power which made the school go, while her sound womanly sense gave it steadiness in the tremendous momentum which it attained. The literary societies blazed with incessant lightning. The commencements were high festivals thronged and aglow with the interest which varied programs aroused and gratified. Included therein, the original colloquies, or amateur dramas, whereof Miss Booth was always the chief author and director, spread Hiram's fame afar. And with it all, her inspiring personality helped mightily to stir the eager emulations of the classroom, to enliven and control the healthful democracy of social life and to create and preserve the gracious religious atmosphere which enveloped the whole.
Of Garfield's leadership in all this, the world at large knows even better, perhaps, than the younger Hiram; for youth is apt to tire of hearing Aristides called the Just.
Nevertheless, the world has yet to acquaint itself with the true and full-orbed Garfield. Doubtless it will never learn to know him as it is but now beginning to know its Lincoln. Garfield's lamp was quenched too soon and his life's end, tragic though it was, lacked the dramatic background to sustain such enduring interest as still follows Lincoln's life. Each was many-sided and not easily viewed whole.
But of Garfield at Hiram some things may, with confi- dence, be asserted. Coming to Hiram with a certain crudity and left-handedness, both outer and inner, but with a likable personality and an ambition to achieve, to excel and to grow, he quickly shot roots deep into the friendly soil of the Eclectic and leafy branches high in its pure air. With a youthful and frolicsome buoyance and an enthu- siasm boundless and highly contagious, with a deep religious reverence, a capacity no less for friendship and sympathetic helpfulness than for emulation and keen rivalry, and with a marvelous bodily and intellectual tirelessness and alertness, Garfield revealed early a rare combination and intensity of personal qualities which marked him out at once as a pre- destined leader of men.
He was always reciting. Whatever he read or learned he wanted straightway to express. As principal of the Eclectic he could not possibly confine his chapel lectures to the Bible alone, ardent Christian though he was. They ranged through the whole gamut of human interest and activities. Many of Hiram's church supporters feared that his Williams College training might have strained his Disciple moorings, and they interposed strong opposition to his becoming the head of the Eclectic. They were anxious lest his enthusiasms might carry him, and the school with him, whither they knew not. But they were soon content. He preached, taught, administered, studied, lectured; he conversed, wrote, electioneered, played and worked. O labors of Hercules! What miracles of work he accomplished. His fellow teachers and pupils became bound to him by ties stronger and more durable than steel. And the Eclectic Institute, with the constituency it served, learned from him what education is and what it means. They learned, too, what religion is and what it is not. The same constituency, through his successive preferments,
which they spontaneously started, at length persuaded their country to trust Garfield as they themselves trusted him.
One among that constituency looked up to and regarded him, as he said at his funeral, with a love like that of David for Jonathan, "wonderful, passing the love of women." Burke Aaron Hinsdale yielded to no man in resolute integ- rity of character. There never was a man more intellectually honest, more devoted to the absolute truth of things than he. And, after his investiture of wisdom in that Golden Age of the Eclectic, there was none so well fitted as he to make the college which grew out of it an honest college, with solid, enduring worth as its corner stone. Small it might be. He had no such magnetism as to draw crowds of students to its portals; no financial wizardry wherewith to attract many or great gifts for its equipment or endow- ment. But sound and true it should be and was.
When, after twelve years, President Hinsdale, in 1882, relinquished the active administration of the College, to publish in accordance with Mrs. Garfield's wish, first the Hiram College Memorial, "Garfield and Education," and then his compilation of "Garfield's Works," he left the College scarcely larger, indeed, than he had found it, but indelibly impressed with his own qualities of rugged truth- fulness and honesty, sound and durable sincerity, and lofty educational and moral idealism.
To those who graduated in his day, and to all who knew him best, Hinsdale seemed to belong by nature to those few whom Matthew Arnold distinguished as "the judicious." He sat in the seat of wisdom and his judgments were forth- right and just. Sophists and charlatans he rebuked, but his friendships were faithful and strong.
Hiram's judgment of him was confirmed when the City of Cleveland called him to its superintendency of instruc- tion; again when the National Educational Association named him as its president; and yet again when the Uni- versity of Michigan summoned him to the chair of the Science and Art of Teaching, which, until his death, he occupied as the acknowledged Nestor of President Angell's great faculty of scholars.
Through this great triumvirate heroes, in Carlisle's sense, from Hiram's Golden Age-from whom she derived her beginnings of whatsoever she possesses of the stead- fastness, sympathy and power of her Booth, the enthusiasm for learning and the transcendent leadership of her Garfield, and the uncompromising devotion of her Hinsdale to all truth, the foundation of Hiram College was laid deep and broad, on which now, in the fullness of time, with seventy- five years of high and honorable service to her credit, she shall build "yet more stately mansions," wherein her spirit- the soul of the old Hiram and the new-shall abide "while the long ages roll."
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