USA > Ohio > Knox County > Past and present of Knox County, Ohio, Vol. I > Part 12
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Countless incidents are related illustrative of his originality, his pioneer spirit, his energy and untiring industry. His "Reminiscences," in two vol- umes, contains his own vibrant narrative, and the "Kenyon Book," compiled by William B. Bodine, fourteenth president of Kenyon College, has in it a wealth of interesting material.
THE FOUNDING.
The granting of the charter of Kenyon College in the year 1824 marks the beginning of the first missionary enterprise of the Episcopal church in the West. That Bishop Chase, the founder of Kenyon, and the men who were associated with him regarded their work as a means of missionary activity for the church is amply apparent from their letters and other remi- niscences. That Kenyon has done a great missionary work is suggested by a comparison of the numbers and influence of the church in Ohio with its strength in the neighboring state and diocese of Indiana. For many years the clergymen and laymen trained at Kenyon determined the religious charac- ter of the diocese, and to the present day Kenyon men have, if no longer a paramount, yet an important, influence in all the religious activities of the diocese of Ohio. Nor have Kenyon's services to the church been confined to the narrow territorial limits of Ohio; throughout the country, in the episco- pate, in the ministry, in lay work, men whom Kenyon has trained are ad- vancing the work of Christ and His church.
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Philander Chase, consecrated in 1819 first bishop of the Episcopal church in the Northwest territory, came to the West on the tide of immigration which between the years of 1810 and 1820 raised Ohio from thirteenth to fifth place among the states in point of population. He chose his time with sagacity. Never was there a greater missionary opportunity than among the thousands who were flocking into the new state. But from the first he felt the need of men. The harvest was ripe, but where were the laborers? His necessity was great ; in all the great wilderness which was then Ohio there was hardly an Episcopal clergyman, and absolutely not a place where one could be trained. But for his herculean frame, which no exertions could wear out, he must have broken down under his long journeys through a sparsely settled, new country, to do work much of which might have been done for him by clergymen or well- instructed laymen.
It was even more difficult then than now to secure missionaries, for it was considerably subsequent to the year of grace 1820 that the rector of Trinity church, Boston, refused aid to a struggling rural parish in Massa- chusetts on the ground that only cultivated persons could appreciate the offices of the Episcopal church, and that none such lived in the country. As this anecdote was typical of a large body of opinion in Boston, New York. and Philadelphia, the large centers of population in which the appreciative cultivated classes were collected, there was not a great deal of missionary zeal and enterprise in those days, no man caring to cast his pearls, be they relig- ious or lapidary, before swine. There were very few clergymen like Bishop Chase to foresee the great future of the new West, shut off as it was by the high mountains.
From the older part of the country, then, Bishop Chase could hardly ex- pect to receive many assistants, and even though the slender means of his people had permitted him to send young men to the East to be trained, it was doubtful whether men educated under such different conditions as the East then presented from Ohio would be either willing or adapted to do work at home. So it was that Bishop Chase determined upon founding a church training school in the opening West, where ministers might be educated at home under the hard conditions of pioneer life, and laymen be bred with the sound of the church's liturgy continually in their ears. Kenyon College was the result of the heroic missionary bishop's determination.
The obstacles that the good Bishop had to encounter in the accomplish- ment of his purpose could have been surmounted only by the strongest in- tellectual conviction of the necessity of his work, an ardent devotion and a will which did not know the meaning of submission to man or to circum- stances. Obviously, to carry out his plans money was necessary-not a great
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deal, for labor and materials and living were all cheap, but much more money than could be provided by the new diocese, which could not so much as afford to pay its bishop a salary.
The lack of accumulated wealth in Ohio and of sympathy in the East determined Bishop Chase to an extraordinary step-a visit to England to raise money for his missionary enterprise. Considering the inflamed condi- tion of national feeling so soon after the war of 1812, the Bishop's resolution was the more audacious and original, and his success the more convincing evidence of the personal authority and influence of the man.
Bishop Chase's trip to England indeed connects itself curiously enough with our national history through the dreary conference of Ghent, in 1814, which. after months of bickering and wrangling, concluded at Christmas a peace in which neither side mentioned the points the settlement of which had in July been declared indispensable preliminaries to any negotiation, for it was from Henry Clay, one of the American peace commissioners, that Bishop Chase received a letter of introduction to Lord Gambier, the chairman of the British commission, and it was chiefly through the influence of Lord Gambier that the missionary enterprise in Ohio secured a hearing in England.
The accounts that have come down to us of the contumelious treatment to which the American commissioners were subjected by their British com- peers make it hard to understand why Henry Clay, nine years later, is rec- ommending friends to the chairman of the British commission. Lord Gam- bier's interest in Ohio is perhaps a little easier to comprehend, for the com- missioners of Ghent had demanded as a sine qua non to negotiation that the United States abandon their claim upon Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, most of Indiana, and a large part of Ohio, and recognize the territory as an Indian reservation under the joint suzerainty of Great Britain and the United States, and over this concession the war of diplomatic controversy had raged most hotly and continuously. The nine years' interval had not extinguished Lord Gambier's interest in the much-coveted Northwest territory, and familiar as he had become in 1814 with its resources and possibilities, he was in 1823 readily persuaded to help Bishop Chase in promoting the work of the Episco- pal church in Ohio.
The principal English donors to Bishop Chase's college were Lord Gam- bier, for whom the Bishop named his village; Lord Kenyon, for whom he named the college ; Lord Bexley, for whom is named Bexley Hall, the Theologi- cal Seminary building ;: the dowager Countess of Rosse, and Hannah More, whose "cordial frankness, elevated sentiment and chastised wit" and other charming qualities Bishop Chase describes in a way quite at variance with the accounts of an observer like De Quincey.
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It was only about thirty thousand dollars that Bishop Chase received from English sources, but those were the days of small things in this country, and the suni then seemed almost munificent. It was sufficient at any rate to enable the Bishop to buy a tract of eight thousand acres of land in central Ohio. This site was purchased from William Hogg, of Brownsville, Penn- sylvania, and consisted of section I, in township 6, and section 4, in township 7, and the 12th range of United States military land, containing each four thousand acres. The amount of money paid Mr. Hogg for the entire tract was somewhat over nineteen thousand dollars.
In the matter of a choice between a city or a country site, Bishop Chase earnestly advocated the latter, because he believed that not only would the students gain thereby in health and morality, but because he saw that wher- ever the seminary should be fixed, there property would at once advance in value, and by securing some thousands of acres the seminary might share in the gains which it would itself create. "If I were to judge in this matter from my present feelings," he said, "and if it were proper to express them here, I should be compelled to declare my great dislike to the confining of our views within the contracted sphere marked out by some for a city seminary, and that both my judgment and my feelings accord with the expressed opin- ion of benefactors in England I myself am witness, and here do testify."
"Through a lifetime of half a century," the Bishop urged, "and far the greater part of this spent in being taught or in teaching others, there has been no one subject on which my mind has dwelt with deeper or more melan- choly regret than this: That there was not in our seminaries of learning some way invented by which our youth, when removed from the guardian eye of their parents, might contend with vice on more equal terms-might be taught, at least, the use of weapons of self-defense before they are brought, as in our city colleges, to contend unarmed with the worst enemies of their happiness-those who find it to their interest or malicious pleasure to seduce them from their studies into vice and dissipation. And here this much de- sired means of preventing evils which no collegiate laws can cure is now be- fore you. Put your seminary on your own domain ; be owners of the soil on which you dwell, and let the tenure of every lease and deed depend on the expressed condition that nothing detrimental to the morals and studies of youth be allowed on the premises."
In order to erect a college in the primeval forest all the task of pioneer life had to be performed on a gigantic scale. The backwoodsman makes a clearing to build his rude barn and the log cabin which is to shelter his own family. Bishop Chase made his clearing to provide for a community, and
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to erect a massive stone building, which is one of the finest architectural monuments of its period in America.
To the difficulties incident to pioneer life were added the suspicion and hostility on the part of the other settlers. When the massive walls of old Kenyon began to rise it was rumored that English money was raising a fort to command a part of the Western country which English diplomacy had not been able to gain possession of at the convention of Ghent.
The college, however, was finally built, and the first class received their B. A.'s in 1829. The manner of life in the new college was necessarily very primitive. Seventy dollars was the price for a year of forty weeks for stu- dents of collegiate rank, and sixty dollars for grammar-school pupils, while a generous reduction of ten dollars more was made to theological students. These prices include all expenses except stationery, books and clothing, and Bishop Chase was hopeful of maintaining permanently this state of arcadian simplicity. In one of his convention addresses he says: "Though it is evi- dently necessary that the boarding department be made to defray its own expenses, yet conscientiously looking to the good of the public, the very nature of our plan of having our institution in the country, surrounded by our own domain, abounding in every necessity of life, gives us reason to expect that those prices can always be kept at their present unexampled and almost incredibly reduced rate."
The picturesque pioneer life of Kenyon College and its founder and first president is very accurately, if jocosely, summarized in a song which is very popular among the Kenyon students of today :
"The first of Kenyon's goodly race Was that great man, Philander Chase ; He climbed the hill, and said a prayer, And founded Kenyon College there.
"He dug up stones, he chopped down trees, He sailed across the stormy seas, And begged at every noble's door, And also that of Hannah More.
"The King, the Queen, the lords, the earls, They gave their gowns, they gave their pearls,
Until Philander had enough And hurried homeward with the stuff.
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"He built the college, built the dam, He milked the cow, he smoked the ham, He taught the classes, rang the bell, And spanked the naughty freshmen well.
"And thus he worked with all his might For Kenyon College day and night ; And Kenyon's heart still keeps a place Of love for old Philander Chase."
But Bishop Chase brought back something more than money from Eng- land; he returned with ideas of collegiate architecture which controlled not only his own building but set a standard for his successors. When one looks at the ugly brick boxes which constitute the historical nucleus of the New England colleges of the same date as Kenyon, one appreciates at its full the architectural debt that the Ohio college owes to its first founder. For in the clearing that he made in the forest the Bishop began a group of buildings which far surpassed any collegiate architecture of that date in America, and which even yet is the equal of any. On January 9, 1827, he laid the corner- stone of old Kenyon, a massive Gothic structure with walls of solid stone four and a half feet thick. Planned as one side of a college quadrangle, its bat- tlemented and pinnacled roof is surmounted by a majestic spire one hundred and ten feet high. A quarry was opened in the college hill to supply the stone, and timber was cut and hewn on the domain. Floors and finish were sawed at the mill built by the Bishop close by at the falls of the Kokosing. When Bishop Chase left Gambier in 1831 the walls of Rosse chapel, the cathedral church of Ohio, were several feet above the ground. The plans for this stately Gothic edifice, with a deep and spacious chancel, were altered by Bishop Chase's successor and the building assumed a simpler and more severe classical outline.
Bishop Chase was a great man ; he saw the opportunity of the moment and seized it. The pioneers of Ohio were of the best and sturdiest stock of the young United States ; they were energetic and intelligent, and appreciated the value of education. But they had not the means to send their sons across the mountains to school and college, even though the journey had not been long, difficult and dangerous ; they needed, and showed that they appreciated, a good education that could be obtained at home cheaply and conveniently. Such an opening for a college has rarely been found, and nobly did Kenyon College fill the place opened for it by the times, for its alumni roll contains a larger percentage of distinguished names than that of any college in the
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country. In those early days when the number of undergraduates rarely ex- ceeded sixty. there were trained at Kenyon Salmon P. Chase, chief justice of the United States and secretary of the treasury; Stanley Matthews, justice of the supreme court ; David Davis, justice of the supreme court; Henry Win- ter Davis. the great orator of Congress; Edwin M. Stanton, secretary of war: J B. Minor, dean of the University of Virginia Law School and the best law teacher of his day in the United States; Bishop Wilmer, of Louis- iana, and Rutherford B. Hayes, President of the United States.
The social. religious and political life of the commonwealth of Ohio was moulded and stamped by the men educated at Kenyon and Western Reserve before the early sixties, and in the broader field of the national life their in- fluence was a potent one. Today the life of church and state is more complex than in the early days; church and state alike are affected by the influx of outside currents; the old colleges which formed the early life of the com- monwealth of Ohio have rivals now in the institutions of other states, brought near by the multiplication of railroads and the increase of wealth; their in- fluence, though important, will not again be paramount. Yet Kenyon has a brilliant future before it as a brilliant past behind it. The pendulum is swing- ing back again: there are many signs that thoughtful people are tiring of education in the gross, of the mingling of the sexes in the colleges, of techni- cal training before the mind is ripe. The old conservative notions of separ- ate, liberal education in small numbers are reviving, and Kenyon College, which, in the midst of an uncongenial and often hostile environment, has maintained the standards of true cultivation and scholarship, never lowering them for the sake of numbers or of popularity, is certain to enter upon the second century of its history with greater endowments and more brilliant prospects than it has ever had in the past.
LATER HISTORY, 1831-1912.
Since the resignation in 1831 of the first president and founder of the college, Bishop Chase, the list of presidents is as follows: Charles Petit McIlvaine. 1831-1840; David Bates Douglas, 1840-1844; Samuel Fuller, 1844-1845 ; Sherlock A. Bronson, 1845-1850; Thomas M. Smith, 1850-1854; Lorin Andrews, 1854-1861 ; Benjamin Lang, 1861-1863; Charles Short, 1863-1867; James Kent Stone, 1867-1868; Eli T. Tappan, 1868-1875; Ed- ward C. Benson, 1875-1876; William B. Bodine, 1876-1891 ; Theodore Ster- ling, 1891-1896; William Foster Peirce, elected president in 1896.
In 1839, as a fruition of the exertions of Bishop McIlvaine, a separate building was erected for the exclusive use of students in the Theological
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Seminary. The working model for this building, Bexley Hall, was sent from England and is a copy of the Elizabethan country house of Lord Bexley. It has been called the finest specimen of pure Elizabethan architecture in America.
In 1850 occurred the sale of the college lands as related in Dr. Bodine's "Kenyon Book." When Major Douglas came to Gambier in 1840 the finances were in a depressed and most deplorable condition. The money collected a few years before had been partially used in the erection of new buildings, partially in the payment of old debts. These debts, however, were not en- tirely obliterated. To meet this deficit, Bishop McIlvaine, in 1833, had found it necessary to contract a loan of fifteen thousand dollars, which he secured "through the great attention and affectionate interest of Samuel Ward, Esq., of New York." This loan, however, proved a very heavy bur- den. Without it, or rather without the debt which it represented, the college financially would have prospered. As it was, there was an increasing ac- cumulation of debt, year by year. It was at length deemed both expedient and necessary to sell the greater part of the original tract of land and definite action to this effect was taken by the trustees.
The college lands consist at present of about four hundred acres, of which approximately one hundred and fifty acres are in use as parks sur- rounding the college and seminary buildings, the college campus comprising ninety acres and the remainder being known as the Bexley Park.
Ascension Hall was erected in 1859 by gifts from the Church of the Ascension, New York. Built in pure Tudor style, its finely proportioned lines and battlemented towers command special admiration. It contains most of the college lecture rooms, together with scientific laboratories, business of- fices and halls of the Philomathesian and Nu Pi Kappa literary societies. These two latter halls are finished in handsome hand-carved oaken beams and paneling.
The records of the Philomathesian and Nu Pi Kappa literary societies are interwoven with college history and the students who in these halls practiced oration and debate have gone forth to utter words not lacking in influence both in church and state. The college literary society records both of Edwin M. Stanton and Rutherford B. Hayes are both highly characteris- tic of the two men in ways typically suggestive. The Nu Pi Kappa Society owes its foundation to an incident in the life of Stanton. When in 1832 South Carolina nullified the existing tariff and the proclamation of President Jackson declared that the whole force of the Federal army would enforce the collection of the duties, the Kenyon student body, many of whom came
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from the South, could talk of little else. Stanton, although he had not been brought up a Democrat, on this issue went over to Jackson and vehemently denounced the action of the nullifying state. His vigorous speeches made the Southerners so uncomfortable that they seceded from Philomathesian to found the Nu Pi Kappa Society. Perhaps Stanton was thinking of the in- fluence upon him of this college debate when in later years he said, "If I am anything or have done anything in the way of usefulness, I owe it to Kenyon College."
President Hayes, whose college life covered the years 1838-1842, played a highly characteristic part in the relations of these two Kenyon literary societies. In the winter of 1841 there were so few Southern students in the college that the members of Nu Pi Kappa feared their society would cease to exist. One of the Southern students, Guy M. Bryan, of Texas, who was an intimate friend of young Hayes, decided to bring the matter before the latter in the hope of devising some means for carrying on Nu Pi Kappa, which was chartered by the state and had valuable property. The two boys discussed the situation with the greatest seriousness. At last Hayes said, "Well, I will get 'Old Trow' Comstock and some others to join with me, and we will send over a delegation from our society to yours, and then we can make new arrangements so that both societies can live in the old college." Accordingly, ten members of Philomathesian joined Nu Pi Kappa and a joint committee from the two societies reported a plan by which students could join either one without reference to sectional differences. It was very natural that the man who, as President, welded the nation together should have been the man in college to go over to the Southern society.
Lorin Andrews, from 1854-1861 president of the college, trained as a lawyer, had, however, achieved signal success as an educator, but when the first call of the President of the United States for quotas of volunteer troops was made, was the first man in Ohio whose name the Governor received. He did this rather less from any desire for a military life than as an example. He was elected colonel of the Fourth Ohio Infantry, which entered for three months' service; re-enlisted July 5, 1861, and died September 18, 1861.
One hundred and thirty-seven students at Kenyon College and twenty- seven at the Theological Seminary were in attendance when the Civil war broke out. Of this number over sixty followed the example of President Andrews, enlisting, North and South, in the armies of the Civil war. Not until 1905 has the attendance again equaled this figure, at which time there were registered one hundred and forty-eight men at Kenyon College and twenty-one at Bexley Hall.
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PROPERTY, IQII.
A list of the college buildings follows: Old Kenyon, built by Bishop Chase in 1827, opened to students, 1829. The interior rebuilt and hand- sommely remodeled, 1905-1906.
Rosse Hall, begun by Bishop Chase, 1831. Constructed on revised plan by Bishop McIlvaine; burned, 1897; rebuilt, 1899.
Bexley Hall, built by Bishop McIlvaine, 1839.
Stone pillars at entrance of college park, erected by President Douglas, 1842.
Ascension Hall, built by members of the Church of the Ascension, New York, 1859.
Church of the Holy Spirit, presented to Bishop Bedell by members of his former parish in New York, 1869.
Hubbard Hall, built by Mrs. Ezra Bliss, 1884, in honor of her brother; burned January 1, 1910; replaced.
The Alumni Library and Norton Hall, the gift of David Z. Norton, 1910-19II.
Stephens stack room, adjoining the library, built in 1903 by James P. Stephens, of the class of 1859.
Prayer cross, erected by the class of 1902, Bexley Hall, to mark the spot where prayer first was said on the college hill.
Hanna Hall, built in 1903, by Senator Marcus A. Hanna, in honor of his wife, C. Augusta Hanna.
Colburn Hall, the library building of the Theological Seminary, built by Mrs. L. C. Colburn in 1904.
The president's house and professors' residence, being constructed 19II- 1912, the gift of William Nelson Cromwell, of New York.
The treasurer's report for 1910-1911 shows the assets of the college to be $1,036,300.85, made up as follows: Net current funds, $8,275.98; se- curities, $364,021.37; real estate investments, $153,803.50; educational plant, $510.200. The budget for the academic year 1910-19II amounted to about $57,000.
DISTINCTIVE FEATURES.
Entirely different from most other Western colleges, though belonging to the saine general type as the small colleges of New England and New York, Kenyon has nevertheless certain individual features which are worthy
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of note. The general character of Kenyon of today is that impressed upon it by its first founder, and Bishop Chase, unlike many founders, would not be dazed by the sights he saw if he could revisit the scene of his labors. He would find new buildings, but built along the grave and dignified lines he himself laid down, and none of the eccentricities in brick and stone with which many a college campus is diversified. Unsympathetic observers might find the village of Gambier somewhat lacking in convenience and in enter- prise, but Bishop Chase would find it just what he intended it to be, namely, an adjunct to his college which should afford the necessaries but none of the distractions of life. The good bishop would find, to be sure, instruction in sciences like psychology and biology, which in his time had no name and scarcely an existence, and in languages like Spanish and Italian, which were hardly esteemed tongues for a Christian youth to learn; but though the humanities include a wider range of subjects than they did eighty or ninety years ago. it is still the humanities and only the humanities that are taught in Kenyon, just as in the days when Latin, Greek and mathematics formed their whole content. Unlike most founders, too, Bishop Chase would not find the ubiquitous American woman in what he meant to be a cloistered seclusion.
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