<\/p>\n
Two years ago, when there were uprisings and violence committed by students on college campuses allover the country, we heard many nostalgic references to the good old days when college students were docile, obedient observers of faculty authority. It is true that years ago students usually seemed more respectful of college officers then they are today, but it is not true that they never revolted.<\/p>\n
In Waterville College that later became Colby, student unrest was so strong in 1833 that it caused the resignation of the first President Jeremiah Chaplin. Chaplin was a man who sincerely had the interest of students at heart, but he was also a stubborn fellow unwilling to admit his judgment could be wrong. When, after a student celebration on the evening of the Fourth of July, Chaplin upbraided them in a chapel talk, calling them uncivilized, crude barbarians, and making the night hideous by “braying like wild asses.” The students demanded a retraction. Admitting they had held a celebration in observance of American Independence, they especially resented the President’s insinuation that they were excited by too much New England rum. Chaplin wouldn’t budge, and the students stopped attending classes, until Professor George Washington Keely, a competent peace maker, persuaded them to return and submit their complaint to the Trustees. Before the board could take any action, President Chaplin resigned.<\/p>\n
Similar occurrences, most of them not so serious, occurred through subsequent years, including the notorious Colby strike in 1903, when, incensed by punishments inflicted for interruptions of the freshman speaking contest by sophomores, first the whole sophomore class, then juniors and seniors, and finally the girls went on strike and actually left the campus for their homes.<\/p>\n
So, while the uprisings of 1971 were nothing new for most colleges, it is significant that in the long history of such occurrences, no college was wrecked, none permanently closed its doors, and most became increasingly more prosperous.<\/p>\n
Until a few weeks ago I had never heard of a Colby revolt in 1846, only 13 years after the one that caused President Chaplin’s resignation. Mrs. Carl Chellquist of Holliston, Mass., a graduate of Colby in the Class of 1948, has sent me a copy of a letter written in 1846 by an ancestor who was a student at the college a full century before her own attendance.<\/p>\n
That ancestor was George Parsons, who came to this backwoods Maine college from Gloucester, Mass. He was then a freshman with the end of his first year only two months away. Commencement was then in August, and Parsons wrote on June 27, 1846 to his sister in Gloucester a letter concerned largely with the girl’s health and with conditions at home. However, the long letter did contain news about trouble at the college. Parsons wrote: “There has been rather an excitement among the students this last week, that I fear will break up the classes. Some twenty students went to the President and asked permission to go to Augusta to attend a celebration there. They were refused and were forbidden to go. They went anyway, and had a good time. On their return they were all brought before the faculty. Some were excused, but the leaders, who admitted to organizing the party, were placed on probation until the middle of next term. Three were suspended from college until next term. It caused great excitement, and several left college with the suspended students. I do not like the way the faculty acted at all. I have not liked some things before, but this has so increased my dislike that I think I shall not return here after the close of this term. The faculty treat the students too much like small boys who do not know their right hand from their left. What the consequences will be I know not.”<\/p>\n
Evidently Parsons laid the letter aside at this point, on a Saturday, for the next paragraph begins as follows: “Monday morning. As I had not time to finish my letter last Saturday, I will resume it now. There is a lot of excitement this morning. One of those who have been put on probation is going to leave this morning, and the students are most all busy raising flags at half mast. There is one such flag on North College, and another on South College, where I room. They blowout to the moderate breeze of heaven. What the faculty will say or do I know not. I suppose they will feel rather bad. However, it is their own doing. They should never have aroused the students in this way. There was surely a better way to handle the incident.”<\/p>\n
That incident must have been a tempest in a teapot and soon have blown over, because there is no mention of it in the faculty records.<\/p>\n
Many similar instances of expulsions, suspensions and probation are recorded at length, but none in the year 1846. It all goes to show that such minor uprisings were so common that some of them did not even get into the official records.<\/p>\n
Another interesting reference in that old letter concerns public transportation in Central Maine 125 years ago. Parsons wrote: “I hope to see you down here at Commencement, which will take place six weeks from next Wednesday. You can come as cheap now in the cars as in the boat.”<\/p>\n
In the early 1840’s the usual method of transportation was by boat from Boston to Hallowell and Augusta, then by smaller vessel up the Kennebec to Waterville, or by stage from Augusta to Waterville. When Parsons mentioned coming in the cars, he did not mean all the way to Waterville, for it was more than three years after he wrote that letter before the railroad reached this city, and even then it got to Waterville before any railroad came to Augusta, for Central Maine’s first railroad was the Androscoggin and Kennebec, which connected at Danville Junction with the Atlantic and St. Lawrence (later the Grand Trunk) and came to Waterville via Lewiston, Winthrop, Belgrade and Oakland. Another line, the Portland and Kennebec, coming through Brunswick, reached Augusta in 1852. In 1846 the railroad terminal nearest to Waterville was Portland. The Eastern R. R. had connected Portland with Boston in 1842, but there was no line from Portland to any other place in Maine. But, when Parsons wrote his letter construction was about to start on another Maine railroad. Parsons’ letter was dated June 27, 1846. Only a week later, on July 5, 1846, the Portland Argus reported: “Yesterday, at Fish Point, at the entrance to Portland Harbor ground was broken to begin construction of the Atlantic and St. Lawrence RR, which will connect Portland with Montreal. In the presence of the assembled representatives and legislature of Maine and a vast conveyance of citizens, work began on this momentous day, the 70th anniversary of American independence.” By 1848 construction of the Atlantic and St. Lawrence had reached Yarmouth, but did not get as far as the place outside Lewiston, to be known later as Danville Junction, until the spring of 1849.<\/p>\n
Parsons did not say in his letter that his family could come to Commencement as easily by the cars. He said they could come as cheaply that way. What he meant of course, was that the trip by train from Boston to Portland, and then by stage to Augusta and Waterville, did not cost any more than the boat trip, and it was indeed faster.<\/p>\n
Did you know that, a hundred years ago, persons who had taken a classical course in a Maine academy, as well as those who had attended college, liked to write letters in Latin. Sometimes said letters, by an older person, were written deliberately to test a young person’s knowledge of the language. That was the case when a prominent citizen of Waterville, on a visit to Michigan, wrote to his student granddaughter back in Waterville in 1881. The man was General Franklin Smith, son of Abijah Smith, pioneer resident and Waterville’s first town clerk. Franklin Smith was prominent in the lumber business, and in state and town affairs. He served in the State Senate and on the Governor’s council. Gen. Smith was 79 years old when, from Kalamazoo, Michigan, he began a letter to his granddaughter in Latin. That granddaughter was Jessie Smith, who later became the wife of Frank Hubbard, the first full-time treasurer of Colby College.<\/p>\n
After greeting the girl fulsomely in Latin phrases, Gen. Smith ended that opening part of his letter with the Latin sentence: “Ergo tentabam facere mihi intelligibilis in angelici.” (I will endeavor to make myself intelligible in English).<\/p>\n
The rest of the letter would be plainly understood by the great majority of young people today, although few of them have ever studied Latin. What the general wrote to his granddaughter in plain English was chiefly to admonish the girl about her handwriting. He said: “The first observation I have to make is about your abominable chirography, not about the characters used to form letters, but by the space on the paper and how the word ought to be formed to tally with others in the sentence. It is a lot of work to read letters so written, and it is polite to save your correspondent all the labor you can. There is no more desirable accomplishment for a young lady than a good handwriting. Therefore I urge you to take a course of lessons from a writing master the first chance you have. Do it on my account and send me the bill. I made a great mistake in my own handwriting in caring more for ornament than legibility, but it is the same in everything else I do. I always bow to grace and beauty.<\/p>\n
“It would give me great pleasure to study your lessons with you, but if you get another year’s start of me, you will be the doctor teacher and I, the puer grammaticalis (grammatical boy). However, when we get into study of the Constitution of the U. S., I shall be all hades again.<\/p>\n
“I hope to see an early improvement in your penmanship. I like best a round, legible hand, with only so much ornament as gives form and grace to the letter. Get some person who writes such a hand to write you a page of foolscap for copy. Then you should copy it as often as you have time, trying your best to imitate it. Of course, you have to write slowly and carefully at first, but keep thinking that a good handwriting is like a good trade, convenient to fall back on if, in your goings to and fro, you happen to fall into necessitude that we are all liable to encounter.”<\/p>\n
And with that reference to a Waterville general and his comments on handwriting, we must say goodbye until next week.<\/p>\n
Year: 1973<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #976, Broadcast on June 3, 1973<\/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":[35313,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9358"}],"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=9358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9358\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}