Elisha Payne the next year. In their places a new generation stood ready for change, such men as Wilder, James Edmunds, Edward Bright, and others who knew of the early trials and sacrifices only from the records or hearsay. It was the beckoning future which held their interest.
Immediately after the special meetings of the Boards to consider the Maginnis case in September 1847, Trustee Elisha Tucker went to Rochester, where he had been pastor of the Second Baptist Church, and reported their actions to Pharcellus Church, minister of the First Baptist Church. He told him that, in his opinion and that of other Trustees and faculty members, removing the University to Rochester would eliminate the various difficulties. Dr. Church, meanwhile, had received a letter from Hamilton hinting at this solution. At about the same time as Tucker’s visit, Wilder, having spent the summer in Hamilton, and Professors Maginnis and Conant arrived in Rochester. All three seem to have agreed with Tucker that removal would be highly desirable.
These visitors found a sympathetic and understanding listener in Dr. Church, himself a University Trustee, a member of the Class of 1824, and the recipient of a D.D. at the commencement of 1847. He was a man of great enthusiasm, rather fond of controversy, a forceful speaker and master of a direct and pungent literary style. A native of Western New York, he had entertained the idea of establishing a college in that area as early as 1830. Though he does not seem to have participated actively in the founding of a short-lived Baptist college at Brockport, Monroe County, which had enlisted the support of Rochester Baptists in the mid-1830’s, he joined with Presbyterians and others in attempting to establish a «University of Rochester” a decade later. Since this project had failed to materialize, he saw in Tucker’s suggestion a means of supplying Western New York with an institution of higher education and at the same time of relieving the University of its problems, financial and otherwise.
Rochester, which was flourishing following the Panic of 1837, seemed an ideal site. With the abandonment of the movement to organize a university under Presbyterian sponsorship the field was now open to the Baptist, who were numerous and influential in the area. The First Church was in a prosperous condition as a result of Jacob Knapp’s revivals there in the late ’30’s. The skillful and devoted
