<\/p>\n
Even for some of us who have been close to Colby College for more than half a century, it is difficult fully to realize how greatly the college has changed.<\/p>\n
About every twenty years, previous to the first World War, the college used to publish what it called a General Catalogue. It was a list, by classes, of all persons who had attended the college since its opening in 1818. Recently I have been re-examining the issue of that General Catalogue published in 1887.<\/p>\n
Now, eighty years later, Colby has about 6,000 living alumni. In 1887 the number was only 609. Between 1818 and 1887 — a period of 69 years a total of 862 persons had attended the college, but during those years 253 had died.<\/p>\n
Readers of my History of Colby College will recall that the first classes taught were for theological students, seven of whom — the very first students enrolled in the college — Jeremiah Chaplin had brought with him from Danvers, Mass., when a Kennebec River longboat brought him, his wife and children, and those students to Waterville on a June day in 1818. It is surprising therefore to learn from the General Catalogue of 1887 that in the succeeding 69 years the total number of theological graduates was only 15. That was because the theological school had been abandoned in 1828, and even before that it had almost no enrollment. Despite his being a devout Baptist minister, Jeremiah Chaplin — Colby’s first president — believed strongly in a liberal arts education, and he made that, not theology, the one program at the new college that would eventually get the name Colby.<\/p>\n
Many Waterville people today have never known that Colby once had a medical school. Rather, it was a medical department operated in connection with an older medical school in Vermont. In order to have its graduates eligible for degrees, the Vermont school, blocked in that respect by an act of their state legislature, made a deal with Colby, whereby, though most of the work would be done at the Vermont institution, Colby would confer the degree. So it happened in 1887 that of the 55 men who had received the M.D. degree from Colby, 50 were still living, though many years had passed since Colby had conferred that degree. In fact this arrangement with the Vermont school lasted less than ten years.<\/p>\n
Needless to say, nearly all of the alumni in 1887 were men. Women had been admitted to Colby only 16 years before, and it had been only 12 years since the first woman, Mary Low, had graduated. So the total number of women alumni in 1887 was only 21. Let us see what were the occupations of the remaining men. As one would suspect, the ministry claimed the largest number, but not by a tremendous margin. While 228 alumni were clergymen, only forty fewer, or 188, were lawyers. Business men, 72 of them, made up the third largest group, followed closely by 62 physicians.<\/p>\n
It has long been assumed that many Colby graduates in the early years had careers in teaching. Such is not the case. Until well into the 1880’s teaching offered little opportunity for men, unless they aspired to be academy principals, college professors, or get into the comparatively new office of superintendent of schools. In 1887 there were indeed nine Colby graduates who had become school superintendents, but almost as many — eight in fact — were college presidents. Thirty-seven were college professors, and 72 were teachers or principals in secondary schools.<\/p>\n
The General Catalogue of 1887 gives some information about the kind of person Colby was likely to notice for the award of an honorary degree. The first such degree conferred at the college went in 1822 to Samuel Waite, and was an Honorary Master of Arts. He was then a young preacher only 32 years old. The next year he joined the faculty of Columbian College in Washington, D.C. In 1834 he became the founder and first president of Wake Forest College in North Carolina. Colby indeed chose well for its first honorary degree.<\/p>\n
The second honorary degree was also a Master of Arts, conferred upon Elijah Hamlin, a graduate of Brown in 1819 and a lawyer at Columbia, Maine. He later moved to Bangor, served in both branches of the legislature, and was for several terms the State land Agent, a very ticklish job. He served for six years on the Colby Board of Trustees, was Mayor of Bangor, and a staunch Whig in politics.<\/p>\n
The first honorary doctorate was conferred in 1830, when Ira Chase was made a doctor of divinity. He was a graduate of Middlebury in 1814 and was for many years Professor of Biblical Theology at the Newton Theological School, as well as author of several religious books.<\/p>\n
The college’s first degree of Doctor of laws went in 1831 to Nathan Weston, who had graduated from Dartmouth in 1803. Bowdoin and his own alma mater had already honored him with the L.L.D. So noted was he as a lawyer and jurist that all three colleges were eager to do him honor. Weston had begun the practice of law in New Gloucester in 1807, but had moved to Augusta in 1810, where he was one of the men who were instrumental in having the state capital moved to that city from Portland. For 32 years he was a Colby trustee and for 52 years a trustee of Bowdoin. He lived to a venerable old age, dying at 89.<\/p>\n
Between 1822 and 1831 the college granted a total of only 25 honorary degrees, of which 19 were Master of Arts. Four were honorary M.D. ‘s — something unthinkable today — and there was one O.O. and one L.L.D.<\/p>\n
It is interesting to note, not merely who were some of those early honored persons, but also who were a few of those in the following years, between 1831 and 1887.<\/p>\n
In 1824 a Master of Arts was granted to Ezekiel Holmes. The college recognized this man of early nineteenth century science ten years before it made him a member of its faculty. When that event occurred in 1834, Holmes was given a longwinded title. He was called lecturer in Chemistry, Mineralogy, Zoology and Botany. His teaching connection lasted only four years, but he kept up an interest in Colby affairs, especially its science courses under Professors loomis and Hamlin until Holmes himself died at the end of the Civil War in 1865.<\/p>\n
Ezekiel Holmes was actually a doctor who began his practice in Winthrop, Maine, but his widely ranging scientific interests would not let him settle down as a country physician. He studied rocks and flowers and trees, animals and insects, stars and planets. Everything in nature was grist for his mill. He was never a full-time teacher at Colby, but only a part-time lecturer. Among his advanced ideas was what later became water-proof garments, such as raincoats. Holmes conceived of a dress made of India rubber and, as he expressed it, “there is much to be learned from this curious gum”. One of his Colby lectures was entitled “Aluminum, Silicum, Coleum and Silver”.<\/p>\n
Ezekiel Holmes became best known not for his scientific interests, none of them profound and many of them naive, but for his devotion to the improvement of Maine farms. For many years he was editor of the Maine Farmer, a weekly paper having at one time the largest circulation in the state. He was the first secretary of the State Board of Agriculture and of the State Agricultural Society. He was one of the organizers of the New England Agricultural Exposition at Springfield, Massachusetts, an annual event that has continued to the present time.<\/p>\n
In this talk about honorary graduates of Colby I have dealt at length with Ezekiel Holmes because during the first half of the nineteenth century he was truly one of the most prominent men in Maine.<\/p>\n
In 1825 the college conferred honorary degrees on Daniel Lovejoy and John Tripp. Lovejoy gained fame only through his son, for he was indeed the father of Colby’s most famous graduate, Elijah Lovejoy, who died in the cause of freedom of the press, while defending his own press against attacks by an angry mob in Alton, Illinois in 1837. John Tripp was one of the founders of Hebron Academy and for nearly half a century minister of the Hebron Baptist Church. His son Ephraim Tripp had been in Colby’s first graduating class in 1822, when he was one of only two graduates. His classmate was George Dana Boardman, Colby’s first of many missionaries to foreign lands.<\/p>\n
In 1835 Colby honored for the first time a visitor from abroad. It gave an honorary degree to Francis Augustus Cox, the best known Baptist minister in London. It was fitting that in 1839 the college should honor Timothy Boutelle with the degree of L.L.D. At that time Boutelle was serving as president of the Maine Senate and was the leading attorney in Waterville. He had been influential in persuading the trustees to establish the college here, rather than in Skowhegan or Farmington, both of which towns’ had made alluring offers. A man of considerable means, he had helped the college financially time and again. On one occasion he had taken over several thousand dollars worth of notes that the college held from purchases of its land grant on the Penobscot River above Old Town. More than any other one man, he had made possible the survival of the college during its precarious infant years.<\/p>\n
No one questioned the appropriateness of an honorary degree that Colby conferred in 1853. It was a doctor of divinity to Samuel Francis Smith. By that time Smith’s national hymn, America, or as it was then called, “My Country ‘Tis of Thee”, had made the man nationally famous. But Waterville people had known him many years earlier. He had come to town in 1834 as pastor of the Waterville Baptist Church, and there he remained for seven years. During that time the college authorities prevailed upon him to be Colby’s first teacher of Modern Languages, and it is worth noting that as early as 1835 Colby was giving instruction in both French and German.<\/p>\n
We have time on this broadcast to note only one other Colby honorary degree.<\/p>\n
It was an L.L.D. conferred in 1859 on a man who a year later would come to national recognition. For the man was Hannibal Hamlin, already a political leader in Maine and well known in the Congress at Washington, who at the famous Republican convention at Chicago in 1860 would be named as Abraham Lincoln’s running mate in the fall national election. When Lincoln was inaugurated President in March, 1861, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine was sworn in as Vice President of the United States.<\/p>\n
Year: 1967<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #744, Broadcast on November 26, 1967<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":405,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[752,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8758"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/405"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8758"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8758\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}