Category Archives: Origin

Samuel Payne settles in Hamilton (p. 4)

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Hebrew and Greek. New seminaries must be erected and endowed since Brown University, founded in 1764 under Baptist auspices, was no longer adequate for the needs of the denomination; no divinity was taught there and at that college as at “almost every other literary institution a large proportion of the students are destitute of the grace of God.” He believed that four seminaries should be set up, one in New England, one in the Middle States, one in the South, and one in the West. Indigent students should be supported by special funds. Until these institutions should be established young men should receive private instruction from settled pastors as heretofore.

Chaplin’s Corresponding Letter inspired Daniel Hascall, pastor of the First Baptist Church at Hamilton, New York, to consider Central New York an ideal location for the seminary in the West. Following the American Revolution this territory was laid out in townships open for settlement. The township later to be known as Hamilton, like most others, fell into the hands of speculators, among whom was Dominick Lynch of New York. Even before the speculators began to advertise their holdings in the newspapers, accounts of the extent and fertility of this land had penetrated New England through reports of Indian traders, missionaries, and soldiers who had seen service on the frontier during the war.

Among the first families to locate in Central New York was that of Hugh White of Middletown, Connecticut, who in 1785 founded Whitestown a few miles west of the present city of Utica. The soil’s fertility and amazingly cheap prices were not to be resisted. Settlers of Madison County wrote home to Rhode Island that wild land was from $4.00 to $7.00 an acre. One observer in Albany noted in 1792 that the emigrants appeared to be people of substance and moved to their new homes well equipped with household furniture, tools, and stock.

Within four years, 1791 to 1795, twelve of the original fourteen townships of Madison County had been opened. Settlers came from eastern New York and all the New England states, Connecticut furnishing pioneers for nearly every town. Hamilton was first settled in 1794 by Samuel Payne who bought a tract in this area from Dominick Lynch. Payne came of a prominent eastern Connecticut family, some members of which had moved to Cornwall, in the western part of the state, and later to Dutchess County, New York, prior to the Revolution. At its conclusion, he with his brother,Elisha, moved to Whites-

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p. 3 – Origin

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who were educating their ministers and the presence of a few well-trained men in American Baptist pulpits also helped to silence the opposers. The best minds in the denomination generally realized that if the Baptists were to keep pace with other religious groups they must have a trained leadership for their rapidly growing church and organizations.

Since any education program adequate for the needs was too vast for one or a few churches to undertake, the Baptists had turned to the formation of voluntary societies as a means of consolidating their resources. The first, the Baptist Education Society of the Middle States, was founded in 1812 under the auspices of the Philadelphia Association. Its young men were sent to study with William Staughton, the active and popular pastor of the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia. An Englishman educated at the Baptist college at Bristol, he had trained students in his home and pulpit as early as 1807. Instruction on an “apprenticeship” basis had long been employed in the ministry as well as in medicine and law.

To send funds and men to Staughton’s “school,” an auxiliary organization was formed in New York City in 1813. Prominent among the members was the Reverend John Stanford, also an Englishman who for several years had taught divinity students at his home and in his private “academy.” In 1817 the New York group was incorporated as the New York Baptist Theological Seminary and the next year established a school of their own.

These educational endeavors in Philadelphia and New York were known to the founders of the institution which eventually became Colgate University, but their chief inspiration seems to have come from New England. Particularly important was the Corresponding Letter of the Boston Association for 1816. This was an annual communication among associations and Jeremiah Chaplin, Baptist pastor of Danvers, Massachusetts, used it for presenting a persuasive plea for improved facilities for educating young men for the ministry. He, like Staughton and Stanford, had trained some in his own home and was well aware of the need for “raising up” more preachers and urged associations, churches and ministers to exert themselves to this end. Refuting the old arguments against an educated clergy he built up a strong case for including secular subjects, such as history, geography, rhetoric, logic, mathematics, philosophy and astronomy, as a part of theological training as well as divinity and the “sacred languages,”

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p. 2 – Origin

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“Colgate Academy” from 1873 until it was discontinued in 1912. The “theological department” was designated the “Theological Seminary” in 1853, the name it retained until its removal to Rochester in 1928 to become part of the Colgate Rochester Divinity School. Madison University was renamed Colgate in 1890.

Sometimes “College” and “University” were used interchangeably, the latter being the more formal term and prior to 1928 it included both “Seminary” and “College.”

In founding the Education Society, Robert Powell and his twelve associates were joining the great movement for the spread of Christian faith and ideals which American and British Protestants advanced with great vigor in the nineteenth century. Organized activity was necessary to achieve their ends and they proceeded to set up various missionary societies on a voluntary basis. The Americans at first turned their attention to the Indians and settlers on the frontier and the English to the Far East. New England Congregationalists, however, sent five young men to India in 1812. When two of them, Adoniram Judson and Luther Rice, on becoming Baptists could no longer claim the support of their original sponsors, Judson went to Burma to inaugurate what became the first American Baptist foreign mission and Rice returned home to enlist support for his colleague. Since the Baptists had no organizations beyond local associations of churches new measures were called for and in 1814 they formed at Philadelphia the General Missionary Convention of the Baptist Denomination in the United States for Foreign Missions, or as it was generally called, the Triennial Convention. To fulfill the obligations for carrying the Gospel to the Far East and the rapidly expanding American frontier, which the Baptists were now assuming, they recognized that trained men were necessary. The “Colgate Immortals,” aware of the needs, were, in founding their society, making their contribution toward meeting them.

Many Baptists opposed ministerial education because of its lack of  “Scriptural sanction” and the fact that uneducated preachers had been very successful in making converts. The gift for preaching, they held, came from God and could not be acquired through human efforts. Furthermore, educated ministers were often thought to “put on airs” The improving economic and social status of Baptists and the rising educational level of the country made many churches dissatisfied with the preaching of unlettered men. The example of English Baptists

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p. 1 – Origin

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Chapter I – ORIGIN

When an old man begins to reminisce those around him often listen half-heartedly and discard golden nuggets of memory which years later they wish they had saved. The Rev. Robert Powell, last survivor of Colgate’s Thirteen Founders, at the age of seventy-nine recalled their momentous meeting in 1817 as he responded to a toast at the Semi-Centennial Anniversary in 1869. His brief remarks were duly recorded but later generations have wished that they had been fuller and that some history-minded member of his audience had asked for details to amplify them. We must be grateful, however, that he, “a solitary remnant of a by-gone age,” as he called himself, could be present in 1869 to give as much of an account as he did. The event in which he took part was indeed significant, for the Baptist Education Society of the State of New York which he and his associates established became the seed of the center of learning known as Colgate University.

The story of Colgate’s early years is often confusing because of the variety of names used in referring to it. In an attempt to give light to the reader they will be explained at the outset. The school which the Education Society actually founded unfortunately had no official title but was first loosely referred to as the “Seminary” or “Institution” and from 1833 to 1846 as “The Hamilton Literary and Theological Institution.” As its course expanded from two years to six there emerged three distinct departments, the preparatory or academic, the collegiate, and the theological. With the granting of the charter in 1846 the three departments were embraced within the new corporation, “Madison University.” The Education Society continued, however, as a separate body with responsibility for the theological department.

With the granting of the charter there were further changes. The academic department was called the “Grammar School” in 1846, and

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