in a seminary situated in an area recently frontier and drawing many of its students from simple country homes. Born on a Vermont farm near Bennington in 1782, he began “keeping school” at the age of eighteen, meanwhile reading in preparation for entering Middlebury College to which he was admitted in 1803 as a sophomore. At this new and undeveloped institution, founded only three years previously, he earned all his expenses. He was a member of the Philomathesian Society, a secret literary group, and at his graduation in 1806 participated with five of his classmates in “A Dialogue on the Means of Advancing Human Felicity” and also delivered “An Oration on True Greatness.” His own privations and struggles for an education enabled him to appreciate the hardships of many of his students. He stood before them as an example of what they might achieve through dogged perseverance and hard work.
Slightly under six feet, compact and wiry in build, he had blue eyes, light hair, a fair complexion, and symmetrical features. He impressed his students with his energy, simplicity, and devotion to the Institution. They were drawn to him by his cordiality, lack of affectation, and humility. The stories of his directing men building the Cottage Edifice as he sat at the window of West Hall hearing the recitations of a class, or, once the hour was over, leading his students to the stone quarry or the hay field where he took the lead in the work at hand, help to make clear his hold over them. Hascall was not a great scholar-as were few college teachers of the period were-but he was an independent, logical thinker who could express himself in a fresh and direct style. One friend called him a man “of the Doric order:’ His theology, though strongly Calvinistic, differed from Kendrick’s in that he refused to accept the doctrine of Particular Atonement which Kendrick firmly believed. This difference of opinion failed to cloud their close and affectionate relationship.
Hascall and Kendrick were well paired for conducting the affairs of the Institution. Where one was modest, diffident, and almost distrustful of himself, the other was bold and self-possessed but at the same time neither forward nor presumptuous. Kendrick first began teaching in the fall of 1820 when he came over to Hamilton from Eaton three times a week to give lectures on philosophy and theology. Two years later the Executive Committee elected him Professor of Theology and
