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
