Radio Script #1164

Little Talks on Common Things
May 7, 1978

Samuel Francis Smith, author of the patriotic’ hymn called “America,” beginning with the words, “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty,” was pastor of Waterville’s First Baptist Church from 1834 to 1841. It was Smith’s first pastorate, for he came, to this church immediately after his graduation from Andover Theological Seminary. I am often asked if Smith wrote ”My Country ‘Tis of Thee” when he was the minister of Waterville’s First Church, which had been organized in 1818 only 16 years before his arrival. The answer is no. How can we be sure? In 1886, forty-five years after he left Waterville, Smith wrote a letter to Rev. Henry Burrage, who by that time had become editor of the Maine Baptist Weekly, Zion’ s Advocate. Burrage had himself been a successor to Smith in the Waterville pastorate, 1870 – 1873. He was well aware of Smith’s early association with the church, and he wanted to publish in the Advocate something about it, with special emphasis on the famous hymn.

Smith’s reply to Burrage’s inquiry is preserved among a collection of Burrage letters in the Colby archives. Written from a cottage at Hull, Mass., where Smith was spending the summer, the letter said: “The hymn ‘My Country ‘Tis of Thee’ grew out of my intimacy with Lowell Mason. While I was at Andover, William Woodbridge returned to this country from Germany, bringing a large number of German hymn books with music, all of which he.put into Dr. Mason’s hands. Knowing that I had some facility in the German language; Mason handed me the books and asked me to make translations. One hymn so struck me that I wrote words for it, without the slightest expectation that the result would ever become anyone’s favorite. But I did keep the original copy, which has exactly the words used in the hymn today. Not a single phrase have I ever changed.

“I wrote the hymn while I was still a student at Andover. It was first sung on July 4, 1832, at a Sabbath School celebration at Boston’s Park Street Church. From the beginning it was taken up at patriotic meetings allover the world whenever a few Americans are assembled. It went from Boston to China and Japan – it was sung in hospitals, camps and coal mines on the sides of the Rockies. In my own travels I have heard it everywhere in this country, in England, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Turkey, India, Burma, and on islands in both Atlantic and Pacific. It is now printed in hymnals of many denominations.

“You may use any of this information in any way you choose, but do not write about it in such a way as to permit any suspicion that I am boasting or heaping self-praise on my own head. Fraternally yours, S. F. Smith.”

Since Samuel Francis Smith was a member of the faculty of Waterville College at the same time, when he was pastor of the Waterville Baptist Church, this broadcast gives opportunity to state some facts about the founding of the college that became Colby. The college, chartered in 1813, was unable to start classes until the summer of 1818, when Rev. Jeremiah Chaplin arrived, bringing with him seven theological students whom he had been teaching in his parsonage in Danvers, Mass.

The college had been chartered as the Maine Literary and Theological Institute. The trustees intended to. start with a faculty of two men, one a professor of theology, the other a professor of ancient languages. To those trustees, most of whom were clergymen, literary meant Greek and Latin writings. The college actually started with only the theological studies. For Jeremiah Chaplin’s use, the trustees rented the then empty farmhouse of Amos Wood which stood on the outskirts of the little village of Ticonic Falls at what is now the junction of Main Street and College Avenue, on the later site of the Elmwood Hotel. It was a large house and in it Chaplin placed his own family of six,and his seven theological students, and in the house he also held his classes for the first year of his residence in Waterville.

Some ten months before Chaplin arrived, the college trustees, meeting in Bowdoinham on October 1, 1817, had voted: “It is expedient that a professor of theology and a professor of languages be elected, the first to have a salary of $600 a year, the second $500 a year. If enrollment shall so warrant, a tutor shall also be employed at $400 a year.

The trustees were not immediately successful in engaging the second professor, so it was decided to open the college with only the theological studies. The vote to secure housing accommodations was passed on August 26, 1818. “Voted, that the Wood house be hired for the accommodation of students, and that all of the house not used by students shall be used rent free by Prof. Chaplin until the next annual meeting of the board.”

Now the point to be noted is that Chaplin was appointed simply Professor of Theology, not administrative head of the college as president or any other title. After the passage of a year with Chaplin as the only professor, the trustees voted in August 1819 that the Prudential committee immediately engage a professor of languages, and publish in the newspapers an announcement of the opening of the literary department. At the same meeting they also voted: “In order to secure a professor of languages without calling another meeting of the board, the Prudential committee is authorized to invite to the position Rev. Thos Ripley. If he declines they will next invite Rev. Avery Briggs.” The vote then added three other names to be approached in order, if those previously invited all declined. Evidently the trustees felt they did not have a very attractive job to offer anyone. Ripley declined, their second choice Avery Briggs accepted, but he did not begin his duties until the spring of 1820.

The college had, before Chaplin’s coming, already bought a large piece of land in Waterville known as the Vaughn lot, then owned by Central Maine’s great landowner, Robert Hallowell Gardiner, grandson of Sylvester Gardiner, leading proprietor of the Kennebec Purchase of 1749. It was one of the big lots surveyed in 1762 by John McKechnie, and it extended 40 rods on the west side of the Kennebec, and a -mile back from the river. On the edge of the level land a hundred yards up from the river, the trustees decided to erect the first building.

Until they,were torn down about twenty years ago, the three large brick buildings that stood in a row were always spoken of as the first buildings of the college. That was not strictly true. The oldest of those three, South College, was not erected until 1822. Its predecessor, a frame house put up in 1819, was erected near the later site of Memorial Hall, and when that fine stone building was built in 1869, the old wooden, frame house was removed.

In the fall of 1819, Chaplin moved out of the wood farmhouse and went farther out of town into the new frame house on the college lot farther up the road to Kendall Mills, the old name for Fairfield Village. Immediately the trustees planned to accommodate more students. On August 18, 1819, they voted to accept a plan for a brick building three stories high and 120 by 40 feet, and they set up a committee to solicit money and materials.

It was finally built in 1822. A year later, in August 1820, came the official action that was to change for at least 150 years the kind of college Colby would be. The trustees voted to petition the legislature of the new State of Maine to change the name of the Maine Literary and Theological Institute to the College at Waterville. To that petition they added a significant provision that “to it be added the name of any such gentleman who shall make the most liberal donation.” The Legislature chose as the proper title simply Waterville College, but that action did not take place until 1821. Knowing that a college was expected to have a president, the trustees appointed a committee to seek and recommend that officer. They chose Rev. Daniel Barnes, who turned them down. That was not because they had rejected Jeremiah Chaplin, but because Chaplin persistently refused to accept the office. When Barnes refused they turned to Chaplin again, and finally persuaded him to accept. On May 15, 1822, the secretary wrote in the trustee records: “Jeremiah Chaplin was unanimously elected President of Waterville College at a salary of $800 a year. Voted that he be inaugurated at the first annual commencement in August 1822.”

And that is how old Waterville College got its first president four years after classes had been started. Forty-five years later, because of a life-saving gift by the Boston merchant Gardner Colby, the name was changed to Colby College.

This program, throughout its thirty years, has gleaned a lot of material from old account books, but I think there has been no previous mention of accounts kept by a school teacher. Recently I saw such a record kept by James H. Hanson, head of Coburn Classical Institute for more than half a century.

In 1846, a typical year of the Hanson accounts, his deal with the school’s trustees was that he could have what he collected in tuition from the students. Since that tuition was only $4 a term for each of the year’s three terms, and since in 1846 there were fewer than fifty students, the head of the school could not get rich, especially since out of that compensation he had to pay any teaching assistants. The trustees paid only for maintenance of the building. Hanson therefore kept fully detailed account of all expenditures. Now note a few of them:

Repairing watch $ .75
Horse and carriage to China .80
Cicero’s Orations .80
Map of the World 1.50
Shears and sundries .90
Scarf 3.00
Ad in Republican Journal 1.00
Assistants in the school 18.12

For the entire year of 1846, he listed the entire income from tuition as $592.71. How extremely frugally he lived is shown by the opposite item of total expense of $332.12, leaving a credit balance of $260.59. One debit item concerned tithe obligation to Waterville’s First Baptist Church. In those. days church members did not make voluntary donations; they were taxed.

Hanson’s item read: “My parish tax $10.”

Year: 1978