Category Archives: Chapter 2

Payne farm purchased (p. 28)

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worked by the students.” Within a month, on March 15, 1826, they
bought from Payne and his wife, Betsey, their farm of 123 acres for
$2,000, half of its estimated valuation.

The acquisition of this property provided the Institution with a
beautiful site on a bench, or level spot, halfway up a hillside which
faced north. From this spot sweeping views, extend east, north and
west and embrace parts of the four valleys which join together at
the village below. The “Hill” with its glorious vistas of rolling fields
and woods thus became the nucleus of the Colgate campus and
quickly began to win the affections of the students of the 1820’s, a
conquest it has been repeating with their successors every year since.

The Trustees agreed to pay for the farm in six annual installments,
the last one due in 1832. In addition to a mortgage on the property,
they gave the Paynes as collateral security a bond covering three
pieces of real estate in the village and granted the use of nearly half of
the farm from which they could get a living. There is no certainty that
the $2,000 in cash was ever paid in full. Casual mention of the annual
installments in the Treasurer’s reports would seem to show that they
were made only whenever the treasury had a temporary surplus. The
Paynes’ failure to insist on a minute observance of the terms of sale
must have been gratifying to the officers of the Institution as they
sought money’ to meet the steadily mounting expenses.  Final settlement was made in 1840 when the Trustees agreed

to furnish annually to the said Samuel and Betsey, during their natural lives, … The following articles and privileges, Viz: The use of the house in which they now live and the garden thereto attached.
All the fruit of the orchard. Grass and hay to keep one cow and one
horse. Two qts. of milk per day while the cow is dry.

(20) Twenty bushels of corn
(50) Fifty bushels of potatoes
(5) Five barrels of flour
The cutting and drawing of twenty cords of three foot wood.*

http://diglib.colgate.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p15119coll3/id/242

A marker which once stood on the quadrangle of the Colgate
campus perpetuated the tradition that when, in 1794, Samuel Payne
felled the first tree of the virgin forest which covered his farm, he knelt
in prayer and dedicated his acres to God. Whether the legend is true
or not there is no question that Samuel and Betsey Payne later
staunchly supported the Seminary.

* Bond given by Trustees of BES to Samuel and Betsey Payne, Mar. 7, 1840.

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p. 27 – Administration, setting, and staff, 1820-1833

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enclosed on three sides with a fence of oak posts and hemlock boards. Subsequently the Trustees bought about four and a half acres adjoining the yard “for cultivation by the students and for building lots.”

No plans or descriptions of the interior exist but it is certain that the building was used both for classrooms and as a dormitory. Accommodations at the time of opening were ample since they were designed for forty students and only about thirty were registered. Seniors had rooms on the third and second floors, the “middle class” on the second, and juniors” on the first. As a means of encouraging donations for outfitting student rooms the Executive Committee agreed that any individual or group providing furniture worth $50.00 might give a name to the room. Articles contributed included chairs, tables, cots, candlesticks, snuffers, pitchers, sheets, pillow-cases, blankets, towels, shovels, tongs, brooms, and “save-alls.” The congregation of the “South Baptist Meeting House,” New York City, asked that the room they furnished be named for their pastor, Charles G. Sommers, who had been the first young man aided by the New York Baptist Theological Seminary. They also requested that it be occupied by Norman Bentley and Seth Smalley, both of the Class of 1826.

Only two years after the completion of the “stone academy,” enrollment had jumped to fifty. At a special meeting of the Board in August, 1825, called to discuss the overcrowding, the Trustees agreed that another building was needed and directed the Executive Committee and the agents to take measures for its erection “without interfering with the funds of the Society.” Perhaps the Board had in its mind Deacon Colgate, Gerrit Smith, or Nicholas Brown, the wealthy Baptist merchant of Providence, Rhode Island, when they further resolved that any person making a donation equal to the cost of a new building might select a name for it. At the request of the Executive Committee, Daniel Hascall prepared and presented a plan for a four-story structure, 100 feet long and 60 feet wide, to be completed in two years ‘at a cost of $6,500. His plan was accepted.

There is no evidence to show where the proposed building was to be placed though there is reason to believe it was to have been located near the “stone academy.” However, the Trustees may have had a different idea, for at a special meeting in February, 1826, they appointed Jonathan Olmstead, Seneca B. Burchard, and Samuel Payne “to enquire into the propriety of purchasing a farm to be

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First building erected (p. 26)

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The First Building c. 1823, A1000-24, Folder 1, p26
Engraving of the first Colgate building, c. 1823

a brick building worth $3,500. By November 1822 they had more than fulfilled their contract. The building was made of stone instead of bricks and its dimensions, 36 feet by 64 feet, were in excess of specifications. It had cost $32.72 more than had been agreed upon and was ready six months earlier than promised. Daniel Hascall had taken the lead in enlisting the support of the villagers, particularly the members of the Baptist Church, and had supervised the construction. His personal finances became so involved in those of the project that a decade later he was in debt over $1,100 and never was fully reimbursed for the sums he had advanced. When the Seminary vacated the brick building the Hamilton Academy used the entire structure until a fire destroyed it in 1855.

The new building, later known as the “building on the plain” or the “stone academy,” stood on the east side of the present Hamilton Street and was dedicated at the Education Society’s annual meeting in June, 1823. A crude woodcut shows the three-story building to have been simple, unpretentious, and similar to remaining examples of the architecture of the period in this locality, such as East and West Halls. Hascall, by direction of the Executive Committee, had the yard

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p. 25 – Administration, setting and staff, 1820-1833

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and students. Like many of them on the frontier, this school relied heavily on aid from friends in the East, especially New York City and the Hudson Valley.

The outline of the Seminary’s fiscal affairs for the period ending in 1833 is fairly clear, though the details are somewhat confusing. Annual receipts increased from $565.76 in 1820 to $6,879.99 in 1833, and expenses from $477.14 to $7,154.94. The rise in enrollment from ten students in 1820 to one hundred and twenty-four, thirteen years later and the enlargement of the teaching staff from one to six during this period explain these figures in large part. Most of the income had to be raised annually by agents’ collections and by subscription of patrons; frequently the latter turned into only partially realized promises. When the Seminary opened, a large amount of the income had been consumed in aid to indigent students, or beneficiaries, as they were called. About 1830 their number declined to fifteen out of the total enrollment of eighty. By this time the faculty salaries had become the chief item of expense though none exceeded $500.

The greatest deficit came in 1829 when the Society was $695.38 in arrears, but 1832 was probably the most trying time because the treasury was practically empty and a new building had become immediately necessary to house the increasing student body. In the emergency the Trustees hired Elon Galusha, who had just concluded a financial campaign for Columbian College, in Washington, D.C., to raise a building fund. The constant appeals for money for missions, Bible translations, and other causes, showered on the some 60,000 Baptists of the 600 churches of the state made the prospects dark. The open neglect or lukewarm attitude toward education of ministers, still common in many quarters, was also discouraging. However, Galusha, who had the reputation of never taking “hold of anything without making the most of it,” completed his assignment and thus secured the new building which went up in 1834.

For the first three years the Institution occupied the third story of the “brick academy,” located on the northwest corner of what are now known as Broad and Pleasant Streets. The village school used the first story and the Hamilton Academy, a private secondary school, the second. The addition of a third story had been one of the conditions under which the Trustees had located their institution in Hamilton. Seminary students were to use it only until the citizens should provide

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p. 24 – Administration, setting and staff, 1820-183

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Filston Hall, p024

 Filston Hall, ancestral home of Colgate family near Sevenoaks, Kent, England

almost exclusively to “reform movements” within his own denomination or to those in which Baptists had a direct interest, such as Bible translation. Annually he gave a tenth or more of his income to the church and other charities.

Genuinely concerned for the welfare of the Seminary at Hamilton, Deacon Colgate cultivated in other people an interest in the institution. His wife, Mary, and Sarah, his daughter, assisted the women’s auxiliary societies of New York to collect money for the treasury and furnishings for student rooms. His sons, James B. and Samuel, after their father’s death in 1857, were to carry on nobly the family tradition in education which he had begun. The hospitable Colgate home was the usual stopping place for Kendrick, Hascall, and other Hamilton Baptists when they were in New York. The shrewd advice which their host must have given them on denominational and financial questions as well as the credit he often extended to the harried Treasurer of the Education Society made William Colgate its preeminent patron.

The Institution’s financial history resembles that of most early American colleges which frequently ran deficits and were enabled to continue their work only through heroic sacrifices by their officers, faculties,

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p. 23 – Administration, setting and staff, 1820-1833

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William Colgate, p23

William Colgate

 

one of the most active members of the New York City board in bringing about the union of the two institutions. A solid, substantial, kindly, and devout businessman, not unlike Jonathan Olmstead or Seneca Burchard, he was to become as influential as they in the life of the Institution. Born in England in 1783, the eldest of five sons, he had been brought to Maryland at the age of twelve when his father, Robert Colgate, was forced to flee with his family from his home, Filston Farm, near Sevenoaks, in Kent, because, according to family tradition, he had agitated for parliamentary reform.


View Filston Hall in a larger map

When William Colgate was seventeen he entered the soap and candle business in Baltimore, but later moved to New York where in 1806 he opened his own shop in Dutch Street. As a result of his almost undisputed control of the soap and candle market during the War of 1812 he accumulated a large fortune. Soon after establishing his business he joined the First Baptist Church, a step which launched his long career as an active and outstanding churchman. He was deeply interested in Baptist foreign missions, Sunday schools, and ministerial education. Unlike many other wealthy philanthropists of the period, Deacon Colgate limited himself

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p. 22 – Administration, Setting, and Staff, 1820-1833

Posted on March 28, 2012 by | Leave a comment

country, especially for “young men from the interior, bro’t up to hard labour; without the advantages of a common school education” and unaccustomed to city ways and often desperately poor. The opportunities at Hamilton for them to supply “destitute churches” on Sundays he stressed as valuable in providing preaching experience and a small financial return. He tactfully called attention to arrangements for cooperation already worked out with the Vermont education society and stated, “If you deem this method calculated to promote the general interest of our common cause … you will accept the assurances of a firm disposition on our part, to enter cordially into such a connection [with you] and be fellow helpers in the same good work.”*

Negotiations dragged on till March 24, 1823, when the Trustees of the New York Baptist Theological Seminary, giving up the idea of maintaining their own school, voted that it was “expedient to send to the Seminary at Hamilton such an annual sum as may be conveniently Spared and such students as may to this board appear Expedient.” Within a month they turned over to agent Joel W. Clark $350 and soon after shipped $100 worth of books to Hamilton. Their first student, William G. Miller, “a member in good standing of the Abyssinian Church,” joined the Class of 1826. Henceforth, the New York Baptist Theological Seminary was a paper organization only, its sole purpose being to assist the Hamilton institution. The Board justified abandoning their own school on the ground of inadequate funds, but the unfailing help which they and other Baptists in New York City, now released from supporting a strictly local enterprise, were to give to the up-state seminary was many times to save it from ruin.** When the Education Society had been chartered in 1819 the New Yorkers had regarded it as a rival The Rev. John Stanford had said, “‘I wonder if the people away off in the woods, a hundred miles west of Albany, are so silly as to suppose that young men licensed [to preach] in the city of New York would think of going away there to obtain an education.” ***But four years later he had changed his opinion.

William Colgate, a wealthy soapmaker and philanthropist, had been

* Baptist Education Society, Executive Committee, to New York Baptist Theo-
logical Seminary, Board, July 29, 1820.

** New York Baptist Theological Seminary, Record Book, 1813-48, passim.

*** New York Baptist Register, July 27, 1848.

 

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p. 21 – Administration, Setting, and Staff, 1820-1833

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became the policy of the Society its resources were opened up for the Institution and Clark Kendrick was made its chief agent in Vermont. His efforts in collecting funds and selecting students made his death in 1824 a severe blow to the struggling Board and Executive Committee. Assistance from the Baptists of the Green Mountain State continued until 1830 when they formed themselves into a branch of the Northern Baptist Education Society (originally the Massachusetts Baptist Education Society) because many of their young men were under its patronage. What interest in education remained was diverted into founding denominational academies within the state.

The Baptists of Connecticut, too, participated in the movement to provide an educated ministry and in 1818 founded an education society. Noting the possibilities of tapping resources in this quarter as they had done in Vermont, the New York society sent Joel W. Clark and Jonathan Olmstead to Connecticut in 1822. They bore a diplomatic letter of introduction and were authorized to broach the question of a union of forces behind the Hamilton institution. A few months later the Connecticut society by a unanimous vote agreed to cooperate. The relationship lasted until 1827 or 1828 when “with friendly dispositions and from local considerations of convenience” the Connecticut society decided to send no more students or funds to Hamilton. Henceforth their energies were devoted to establishing their own academy and assisting the Northern Baptist Education Society.

Since the Executive Committee had come to believe by 1831 that New York State alone was large and prosperous enough to maintain the Seminary, they agreed not to interfere with the plan of the Northern Baptist Education Society to extend her auxiliaries in New England. The support which the Institution had found among Baptists of the Empire State, especially those of New York City, made it possible for the Committee to come to this decision.

The earliest contact between officers of the Institution and metropolitan Baptists seems to have been in 1820 when Joel W. Clark and Elon Galusha went to New York to solicit books for the library. Their visit prepared the ground for discussing the possibility of consolidating the New York Baptist .Theological Seminary, which was not proving a success, with the school at Hamilton. After their return to Hamilton, Kendrick took up the question in a letter to the Board of the New York Institution. He pointed out the superior benefits of a seminary in the

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p. 20 – Administration, Setting, and Staff, 1820-1833

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philanthropist, Gerrit Smith, gave 10,000 feet of seasoned pine boards, 20 bushels of wheat, and $25.00 worth of “furnace ware.” Kendrick, Olmstead and Galusha on a trip to Albany obtained $20.00 from Governor DeWitt Clinton, $10.00 from Lieutenant-Governor John Tayler, and $2.50 from Chancellor James Kent. On commencement day, 1823, the Reverend Calvin Philleo of Westmoreland; a Trustee, gave 150 acres of military bounty land in Illinois. The best the Baptist Triennial Convention could do for the Institution, however, was to wish for its work “the blessings of heaven” because the interests of the national organization were centered in Columbian College, in Washington. Nonetheless, favorable sentiments of any kind must have been appreciated by Kendrick and other officers, who were always quick to note the state of public opinion towards the Seminary.

In areas where Baptists took kindly to their cause; the agents formed auxiliary or: branch societies to act as local, fund-collecting agencies for the parent society in Hamilton. This practice, then in common use for raising money for home and foreign missions, proved a convenient method for combining many small contributions into substantial sums. The women’s’ auxiliary’ societies were especially valuable’ because many of the members who were unable to give money contributed through these organizations the products of their spinning wheels, looms, knitting needles, and kitchens.

From 1820 to 1830 Vermont was an important reservoir of funds and students. The Corresponding Letter oil ministerial education sent out by the Boston Association in 1816, which had stirred Baptists of New York State to action, met with a similar response in Vermont. Here also an education society was founded, its constitution in many respects resembling those of the Massachusetts and New York societies. However, provision had been made in it for cooperation with other organizations with the same objectives.

When the Executive Committee of the New York society learned of the existence of the Vermont group they foresaw competition with it in the eastern counties of the Empire State. A correspondence between the two potential rivals led to Kendrick’s being sent to discuss matters with the president of the Vermont society, his cousin, the Reverend Clark Kendrick, and with other members of the board. These he found cordially disposed to cooperate with the New York State organization rather than found a school to compete with it. When their views

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First issue of New York Baptist Register (p. 19)

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and his brother editors announced their support of the Institution, a policy which their successor, Alexander M. Beebee, steadily maintained for thirty years after he took over the paper in 1825. Since the periodical was widely read, its continued assistance was a valuable asset.

The Register prepared the churches for visits from agents of the Society who collected contributions and testified to the genuine piety and purpose of the Seminary. The Executive Committee had stated in 1820:

There remains no doubt but a liberal patronage will be afforded this Institution, from the flourishing region of the country bounded east by the Green Mountains, west by the Niagara River, north by Lake Ontario and the river St. Lawrence, including, perhaps, some portion of Pennsylvania on the south. Within these limits are nearly five hundred Baptist churches; about three hundred of which are in the state of New York, west of the Hudson River. But a small number of these churches have been visited, or even become acquainted with this Society.*

The contacts the agents made not only produced a large part of the annual income but also won over many Baptists hostile to the training of ministers. When the needs of the Seminary required special exertions, and that was fairly regularly, the Trustees appointed full-time paid agents. Among the most successful were Joel W. Clark and Elon Galusha. Occasionally, friends of the Institution were induced to make collections in their own areas and often Kendrick, Hascall, or other faculty members “accepted an agency.”

The agents received donations of goods as well as money; and in their reports are found listed such items as cloth, articles of clothing for students, chairs, a saddle, a thermometer, a bed, and stoves. Some could be used and others sold. Contributions of food, such as an 18-pound cheese, a bushel and a half of dried apples or 565 pounds of pork, valued at $33.90, could be added to the larder of the boarding house or sold to merchants. The Reverend Spencer H. Cone, prominent Baptist preacher of New York City, sent 42 copies of his edition of Jones’ Church History to be sold for $219.50; he agreed to give a quarter of that amount to the Institution. General Abner Forbes, member of the Vermont legislature, donated 60 merino sheep including “one good size full blooded Merino buck.” The wealthy Peterboro

* Baptist Education Society, Annual Report, 1820, p. 6.

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