\nToday I want to tell you about another man who was prominent in this part of Maine more than a hundred years ago. He was a Baptist minister, Rev. Sylvanus Boardman, one of the original promoters and most active supporters of the college at Waterville that is now Colby.<\/p>\n
Sylvanus Boardman was a great-great grandson of William Boardman who came to Cambridge, Mass. from England in 1638. and who served for twenty years as Steward of Harvard College. Sylvanus’ father, Andrew Boardman, graduated from Harvard in the Class of 1737 and then became pastor at Martha’s Vineyard, where he died in the year of the Declaration of Independence, 1776. On that island. in our time made notorious because of a Kennedy tragedy, Sylvanus Boardman was born on September 15, 1757.<\/p>\n
Sylvanus was in Latin School preparing for Harvard when British soldiers occupied Boston just before the Revolution. After the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord on the 19th of April in ’75, he gave up the idea of college and began the study of medicine with a Cambridge physician. When his father died in the very next year, Sylvanus had to go to work, and for ten years he was an itinerant school teacher in Rhode Island, Connecticut and New York. He decided to see whether a chance for a more settled future might be available in the District of Maine. With three other men from Martha’s Vineyard, he obtained a grant of land in Livermore and became one of the first selectmen when the town was incorporated in 1795.<\/p>\n
In 1790 Sylvanus had married Phoebe Dana and had become a member of her Congregational Church. So he took an active part in establishing a Congregational Church in Livermore. Becoming convinced that Baptist doctrine was more to his liking, he changed to that faith and joined the Livermore Baptist Church in 1795.<\/p>\n
Without any formal theological training, Sylvanus was ordained as pastor at North Livermore in 1802, when he was already 44 years old. He was a man of striking physique, six feet two inches tall, weighing 230 pounds, and of great muscular strength, being able to carry on each shoulder, a big bag of meal. When the Maine Literary and Theological Institution, forerunner of Colby, received its charter in 1813, Boardman was the Baptist pastor at North Yarmouth.<\/p>\n
He was then a staunch Jeffersonian Democrat and a close friend of William King. With other prominent Baptists he persuaded King to foster the cause of the new college in the Massachusetts Senate.<\/p>\n
In 1816 Boardman received a call from the Baptist Church at New Sharon that read as follows: “The Church in this place has never been without a pastor, so your coming to us would be an act of Divine Providence, and we cordially invite you to the pastoral office of this church.” Boardman accepted and served the New Sharon church for thirty years.<\/p>\n
Like Governor Lot Morrill, whom we talked about a few months ago on this program, Sylvanus Boardman was an early advocate both of anti-slavery and of temperance. As a trustee of Waterville College, he was influential in its formation of an anti-slavery society more than a quarter of a century before the Civil War in 1834.<\/p>\n
Sylvanus Boardman died at New Sharon in 1845, survived for 15 more years by his wife, who died in 1860 at the age of 91.<\/p>\n
Like so many men who deserved remembrance in their own right, Sylvanus Boardman is best remembered for his more famous son, George Dana Boardman. That son was born in Livermore in 1801, the sixth of eight children. At the age of 18 he entered Waterville College and was one of the only two men to receive his degree in the first graduating class in 1822. While in college the young man became interested in what was then the new cause of foreign missions. When one of Adoniram Judson’s young associates in Burma, James Colman, met his death from jungle fever, George Dana Boardman offered to take his place and was accepted.<\/p>\n
After further study at Andover Seminary, he was ordained in his father’s church at North Yarmouth in 1824, the Waterville College president, Jeremiah Chaplin, preaching the ordination sermon.<\/p>\n
Just before leaving for Burma, George Dana Boardman married Sarah Hall, and they sailed from Philadelphia for Calcutta in 1825. There, because of war in Burma, they had to stay for a year and a half, but at last they could start work in Judson’s Burma. Seeing an unusual opportunity to leave Judson’s favored center in Rangoon, Boardman and his wife went into the jungles of North Burma to work among the wild Karen tribes. Instead of being at once massacred, as was predicted, Boardman won the friendship of those savage people, so that today, even when no Christian missionaries are now allowed in Burma, the strongest Christian communities in that land, all under native leadership, are in the Karen hills.<\/p>\n
George Dana Boardman, like his predecessor Colman, died of tropical fever in 1831. A few years later his wife became the second wife of Adoniram Judson.<\/p>\n
So much attention is now being focused upon the Maine Penobscot and Passamaquoddy Indians that it is well for us to be reminded about one phase of their life since Maine became a separate state 150 years ago. That phase is Indian education. Its origin goes far back to the work of Jesuit missionaries in the 17th century. Father Rasle at Norridgewock is given credit for having established the first Catholic school in Maine, as well as the first one for any Maine Indians.<\/p>\n
When the American Revolution broke out, the Massachusetts government, as well as the Continental Congress, sought support from the Maine Indians, who for more than a century had shown their hatred of the British, and that nation was now the enemy of the colonists. In 1777 the Massachusetts official who carried the title of Superintendent of the Eastern Indians, concluded a treaty with the Passamaquoddys that guaranteed those Indians the free exercise of religion of their choice.<\/p>\n
But after the temporary but serious dissolution of the Jesuits in 1773, priests were not easy to find. The government in Boston was of little help, and the Indians turned in 1792 to Bishop Carroll of Baltimore who succeeded in having a refugee priest sent from France to Maine. The Bishop appealed to President George Washington for aid, and Washington referred him to the Governor of Massachusetts. At last in 1798 the Massachusetts Legislature appropriated $200 a year for “an Indian missionary who should live alternately with the Penobscots and the Passamaquoddys”. In 1818 Massachusetts agreed to provide the Penobscots with “a man to instruct them in the arts of husbandry, assist them in tilling the ground, and make necessary repairs to their church”. Then in 1820 the State of Maine agreed to assume all of the Massachusetts obligation to the Maine Indians. Thus the long-continued policy of supplying by public funds, the Catholic mission and schools on the Indian reservations derives from the treaties originally made with the Indians by the General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.<\/p>\n
In 1820 the total number of Maine Indians was only 750 and they were almost entirely Catholic. The Maine Constitution laid down certain protected rights. Section 3 of Article One states: “All men have a natural and inalienable right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own consciences, and no one shall be hurt, molested, or restrained in his person, liberty or estate from worshipping God in the manner and reason most agreeable to his own conscience.”<\/p>\n
Now note that the Maine Constitution does not say “all citizens”; it says “all men”. Thus it applies alike to citizens and non-citizens who reside in the state, and the fact that Indians are wards, not citizens, of the state does not deprive them of their religious rights.<\/p>\n
Article VIII of the Maine Constitution says: “It shall be the duty of the Legislature to encourage and suitably endow, from time to time, as the circumstances of the people may authorize, all academies, colleges and seminaries of learning within the state.” That provision was in addition to the duty requiring the municipalities to maintain public schools.<\/p>\n
For many years after 1820 the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy Indian schools were in charge of Indian agents who sought and secured aid from the school committees in neighboring towns. In 1878 the Sisters of Mercy took charge of the school on Indian Island at Old Town. The following year they also took over the schools on the two Passamaquoddy reservations. Under the old treaties the state continued the obligation of providing money for a priest to the same Indians, an obligation that the state still honors by paying $40 a week to each of three priests. Turning over the schools to the Sisters of Mercy was entirely in line with this established policy. The sisters proved to be devoted teachers and did much to improve the quality of the Indian schools.<\/p>\n
In 1905 the school on Indian Island at Old Town was placed under the Superintendent of the Old Town schools, but it was not until 1921 that similar action was taken with the Passamaquoddys at Pleasant and Peter Dana Points. Today the teachers must meet state requirements for certification and children on Indian Island may by parental choice attend either the school there or the schools in Old Town.<\/p>\n
One of the controversial points about Indian education, not only in Maine, but on the great reservations of the West is what Indians regard as the destruction of their native culture. Especially attacked is the requirement that all subjects in the Indian schools shall be taught in the English language and the textbooks shall be the same as those used in the towns where the Indian schools are located.<\/p>\n
Whether, in light of the requirements of the federal constitution declaring the separation of church and state, some other method ought to be found to will face that question with one predominant criterion — the best interests of the Indian children.<\/p>\n
Year: 1970<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #855, Broadcast on May 31, 1970<\/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":[1205,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9053"}],"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=9053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9053\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}