Radio Script #1324

Little Talks on Common Things
October 24, 1982

This program has had much to say about Waterville’s numerous churches, but we have said very little about Sunday Schools.

Since their beginning early in the 19th century, those institutions have been successively called Sabbath Schools, Sunday Schools, and Church Schools. The last is their favorite present designation. The movement began in Waterville in 1817, when a visiting missionary of the Massachusetts state church, the Congregationalists, gathered children each Sunday of his stay, and taught them Bible Stories. He spoke disparagingly of Waterville saying he found it populated by infidels and Universalists, but he still hoped that something could be done with them. That was a year before Jeremiah Chaplin arrived to found the town’s first denominational church, the Baptist. At that time the Rev. Thomas Adams had just been appointed by the Congregational state church in Boston to set up churches in the Central Maine area; but before he considered Waterville, Chaplin had set up a Baptist church there. Considering Congregational conflict with Baptists not worth the risk, Adams temporarily left Waterville alone and gave his attention to Vassalboro and Winslow. In 1828 he did start a Congregational Church in Waterville.

One of Chaplin’s deacons. John Partridge, taught Waterville’s first regular, locally conducted Sunday School in his tavern, near the site of the present Sterns store on Main Street, and kept it going until 1827. Early in that year, a year after the opening of the Baptist meetinghouse. that denomination started its own Sunday School, and in the following year was followed by the Congregationalists.

The Baptist school was strongly supported by faculty and students of Haterville College, of which Chaplin was president. In 1834 Samuel Francis Smith, author of the national hymn This Country ‘Tis of Thee became the Baptist pastor and teacher of modern Languages at the college. He gave special attention to the Sunday School. placed several students in it as teachers, and, during his tenure, baptized all the members of six of the school’s classes.

An unusual feature of the early Baptist Sunday School was its extension into the French-Canadian population. In the 1830’s that population, though already predominantly Catholic, contained a number of French Protestant families. A college student, Jonathan Furbush, started a Sunday School for French children in 1834. The next year Furbush wrote to his mother: “Next Saturday, July 4, will be the anniversary of American independence, and the fourteen Sabbath Schools of this vicinity will come together in Ticonic Village to celebrate the day. They will meet at the Baptist Church at 9 a.m. and will march from there to a grove near the village, where they will hear an address by Rev. George Shepard of Hallowell, and will have a meal prepared by the ladies of the village. The grove to which Furbush referred was located just north of the then new buildings of the college, and is the area now occupied by the Maine Central yards off College Avenue. Young Furbush died in 1836 and was later buried in what is still the college lot in Pine Grove Cemetery. His work with French children was taken over by another student, Stephen Page. A succession of college students continued it until 1848 when it was made a part of the Baptist Sunday School, and soon became a function of the French mission set up by that church on the Plains. That mission became the Second Baptist Church which is still located on Water Street.

In 1875, when Edward W. Hall, Librarian of the college, was clerk of the Baptist Church, he organized a Sunday School Library at that church. By that time the Sunday Schools of other denominations had become strong in Waterville, The Congregationalists had had one since 1830, and the Universalists had started theirs in 1836. In 1870 their school enrolled more than 100 members. The Unitarian church, then only five years old in Waterville, also had a large school. The }1ethodists, though they had no church building here until 1870, did provide Bible instruction in their numerous Methodist classes set up in the vicinity. After 1870 their central Sunday School grew rapidly.

Of course the Catholics had long given religious instruction to their children. Their catechism classes were frequently taught by dedicated laymen, as well as by priests and nuns. So it is true that, for more than a hundred years. all the denominations in Waterville existing in 1880 and most of those founded since have regularly conducted Sunday Schools.

The Baptists were the first to have an organized Sunday School with elected officers. That came in 1849. when. Deacon W.A.F. Stevens was made superintendent. and the school also elected a secretary and a treasurer, Stevens, fifteen years later was the only man in Waterville who lost two sons in the Civil War. Stevens was followed as superintendent by the famous principal of Coburn. James Hobbs Hanson. who persuaded the church trustees to provide $40 for the church school. and who set a committee to recruit members from families whose children were not already attending Sunday School of some other denomination. That movement greatly increased the Sunday School.

Until late in the 19th century, the Sunday School was an institution distinctly for children, but by 1890 adult classes had begun to be popular. They reached their height in the 1920’s when the Men’s Class at the Baptist school numbered more than 100. In the 1930’s many churches conducted summer church schools a week or more in duration; and on several occasions two or more of the churches joined together to operate such a summer session. At the same time daily religious instruction for children on a non-denominational basis, was also provided by the annual Chauta:ugt:la”. tl:lat -0perat.ed for· a week each summer in Waterville, with its tent pitched in Monument Park.

So, for 164 years there has always been some kind of Sunday School in Waterville. Now let us turn to a man known to few fine people now living and even whose name many Maine people never heard although he served for 27 years as the President of Bowdoin College. He was Reverend Leonard Woods, who had graduated from Dartmouth in 1829 as valedictorian of his class. and had attended Andover Theological Seminary where he got his divinity degree. After serving two churches in New York, he came to Maine in 1830 as Professor of Biblical Literature at Bangor Seminary.

In 1836, he wrote of Bangor: “There was, in that little gay metropolis of the East, probably more culture than can be found in any other city in the whole country. There were many cultivated ladies familiar with society and with books. The Unitarian influence, just beginning to take hold in Northern New England, greatly affected the place, and certainly added to its cultural emphasis.”

Leonard Woods was by no means a Unitarian in religion, but he was considered a liberal in his day, because he rejected the doctrine of predestination and believed in freedom of the will. After three years at Bangor Seminary, Woods was only 32 years old when he accepted election as President of Bowdoin College. His inaugural address was one of the first articulate attempts to reconcile religion and science, although science itself was then in its infancy, and a quarter of a century would elapse before Darwin would arouse the wrath of religious fundamentalists with his theory of evolution. Woods was certainly a pioneer in the contention that observable knowledge can accompany religious faith in harmony.

At that time there had been much misbehavior by students in New England colleges. Indeed it was such disruption that caused the resignation of Colby’s first president, Jeremiah Chaplin, in 1833. President Woods attacked Bowdoin’s disciplinary problem with vigor. He called individual offenders before him, and talked with each calmly about the meaning of a college education. Somehow this was effective, and student disturbances on the Bowdoin campus became rare during his long administration. In 1840 Woods made a trip to Europe. where in Paris he was the guest of Louis Phillipe. and in Rome had a personal audience with the Pope. On his return to Brunswick he applied his European experience to effecting changes at Bowdoin, especially in respect to religious tolerance. Woods was not only teacher and administrator, but also poet, essayist, and profound scholar. No layman had better knowledge of law than he and he was largely responsible for Bowdoin’s victory in a law suit over the estate of a Massachusetts philanthropist. He was in politics a middle-of-the-roader, not a member of any political party. And in religion he got along admirably with Protestants of every denomination and with Roman Catholics.

This man found no great place in history as did Bowdoin graduates Longfellow, Hawthorne, Franklin Pierce. and Robert E. Peary, but to hundreds of Bowdoin graduates he was an inspiration that profoundly affected their lives.

Year: 1982