over the Seminary and to present its needs to the rank and file of Baptists, whose outlook on life they understood and usually shared. The laymen brought to the deliberations contacts in business, politics and agriculture which proved helpful in deciding many more or less secular questions relating to the Institution. Nearly all the Trustees lived within a fifty-mile radius of Hamilton, an essential arrangement if they were to travel to meetings over deeply rutted or snowbound roads.
Joel W. Clark, minister at Waterville, and Dr. Charles Babcock, New Hartford physician, were the first Secretaries of the Board. Their successor, Nathaniel Kendrick, who served from 1819 to 1848, developed the office into the most influential and responsible in the Society. His vigorous personality, his knowledge of the Seminary’s immediate problems, his extensive correspondence with Baptists throughout the country and his high standing in the denomination where he was an officer of the Triennial Convention and the Home Mission Society, made him the dominant man in the organization. “He ruled in every position, not with an arbitrary power, but by natural authority,” one associate remembered.*
Like many other American colleges of the day, this school had found in Kendrick a leader able to unite the forces which had given rise to the Institution and fashion them steadily in such a way as to achieve a lasting result. He was the architect who shaped most of the foundations and also one of the builders who gave the edifice permanent form. His preeminent quality, “practical wisdom,” kept him from rash experiments. Reluctant to accept innovations, he yielded gracefully when outvoted by the other Trustees. Though a man of strong emotions, he had so disciplined himself that a slight compression of the lips or a glance of his eye were often the only traces. His dignity, which a thoughtful kindness mellowed, assured him an involuntary deference wherever he went.
Formal recognition of Kendrick’s leadership came in 1836 when at the request of the faculty “that their respected and reverend brother Nathaniel Kendrick, be recognized by the Board of Trustees as the President of the Institution,” the Trustees unanimously elected him to that office. He hesitatingly accepted the honor and seems to have held
* Philetus B. Spear, Class of 1836, Spear MS., 1.
