knew them well wrote that “in those important aids which human learning and intellectual culture afford to the servants of the gospel, they were comparatively deficient.” “So illiterate” was one “at the time he commenced in the ministry, that it was difficult for him to read a sentence intelligibly.” His experience of the want of education “and the privation and embarrassment he had suffered as a consequence” made him a warm advocate of ministerial education for the young men who were to succeed him.*
The time was ripe for taking action, not only because the need was recognized but also because economic conditions were favorable. The current boom in agricultural prices due to extensive crop exports to Europe and to the high cash prices recently paid for provisions in the state during the War of 1812 brought prosperity. Moreover, a new wave of revivalism strengthened the churches which were increasing in size and numbers; material and spiritual prosperity went hand in hand.
Payne’s Settlement shared in the “new impulse … which resulted in the up swinging of various enterprises.”
Serving as the trading center of an agricultural community, the hamlet naturally throve when farmers received high prices for their products. Its business was probably augmented by the new Hamilton Skaneateles Turnpike. Also, its accessibility helped to make it a common meeting place for the militia of the vicinity. Several new buildings, many of brick, had been erected, among them a two-story structure for the recently established Hamilton Academy. The population had so increased by 1816 that it was possible to incorporate the settlement as a village called Hamilton. The same year saw the beginning of the first newspaper, the Hamilton Gazette. When the Baptist meeting house was burned to the ground in 1818 the church was sufficiently thriving that it could not only rebuild in less than eleven months but raise the salary of the preacher as well. Surely, no time could have been more propitious for the founding of the Baptist Education Society of the State of New York.
Daniel Hascall, an alumnus of Middlebury College, Class of 1806, had been pastor of the church since 1813. For a long time he had been concerned about raising the educational standard of the Baptist clergy. His interest received stimulus from the educational efforts of the New
* John Peck & John Lawton, An Historical Sketch of the Baptist Missionary Convention of the State of New York (Utica, 1837), 55, 203-204.