Macalester College - Quid Nunc Yearbook (St Paul, MN)

Page 11 text:

ff' 1, 9QJsr'bACK in the days of Romanesque architecture and sweep- i ' N , ing moustaches, when Macalester was one lonely building X Jon a wide sweep of prairie, the first Mac was dedicated. A I0 . . . 1 k N At the time this little book appeared there was at the 's?xT'5if:1r5v'head of the Department of History a man whose name should mean something to every graduate of Macalester College-without whom, indeed, there would have been no college. This was Dr. Edward D. Neill, founder and first president of the school, a man Whose unquenchable enthusiasm for life led him into the Great West in the days before Minnesota had become a state, whose Christian ardor established and fostered the first Presbyterian churches in St. Paul, whose enthusiasm for education contributed to the founding of many schools, among them the University of Minnesota, the first State Teachers' Col- lege at Winona, and Macalester College. As pastor, educator, historian, and diplomat, Dr. Neill had a life of colorful adventure and stirring challenge, and his name is forever linked with the struggles and achievements of early Minnesota history. His was a career which led from a bare frame chapel in a Minnesota frontier village to the great libraries in London and back again across the Atlantic to a college in the Mississippi Valley. The story of this man is not only instructive but inspiring-a chap- ter of pioneer life which leaves us with a great pride in him who founded our college and whose simple heroism and patient endeavor overcame dis- couragements and made Edward D. Neill a builder of our state and nation. With the hope that future generations may somehow preserve with- in his school that spirit of wisdom and unflinching Christianity character- istic of his life, we dedicate this book to Edward Duffield Neill. -The Editors

Page 13 text:

A PIONEER PASTOR N the first issue of St. Paul's V3 ' ' ' 0 first newspaper, the St. Paul Al Ii Pioneer, which made its ap- . O pearance on the twenty- eighth of April, 1849, was the following statement: Rev. Mr. Neill, a member of the Presbytery of Galena, is expected to preach at the school house on Bench street, next Sunday, ftomorrowj, at ti if 6755559 755-7356-7 eleven o'clock in the morning. Thus was the first Protestant missionary resident of St. Paul introduced to the territory in which he was to play so interesting and important a part. -1- 4- It was on April 23, 1849, after a stormy, difficult trip, marked by days of rain and cold, that the steamboat Senator docked at the Jackson street landing in St. Paul. When the stage was out, a young Presbyterian minister stepped ashore and set out to acquaint himself with the little hamlet to which he had been commissioned at his own request. It did not take him long to survey the few stores and private homes then clustered about Third and jackson streets, with a little log chapel be- longing to the Roman Catholics overlooking the town from the westward. Fmsr DAYS IN A FRONTIER VILLAGE Walking up Bench street, which lay to the south of Third, young Neill passed a rude shanty, and becoming interested in its dusky interior, he entered and found himself in the office of the St. Paul Pioneer, a very young paper. In fact, the first issue of the Pioneer was just then in the process of preparation by James M. Goodhue, a native of New Hamp- shire, and a graduate of Amherst College. This last must have been delightful news for the young pastor, for he, too, was an Amherst man, having received his Bachelor of Arts degree there in 1842. Young Mr. Neill immediately subscribed for the paper, and then sat down to write an account of a drowning which had occurred at a place near Prairie du Chien when the Senator was on its way up-river. In this incident was the beginning of a friendship between two of Minnesota's greatest pioneers, both of them deeply interested in the progress of the state, both of them contributors to her progress, although in different ways. The following Sunday Reverend Neill for the first time addressed his new congregation. There is something very stirring in the thought of what that first Sunday was to the group of people who gathered in the schoolhouse to hear a sermon by the young man from the East, who had refused the pastorate of one of the largest churches in Galena, Illinois, to plunge into a new territory farther west. BoY1sH Diusnms AND lVlANHOOD,S Rnnuzn- TION The pioneer spirit colored all the life of Edward Neill. Even as a boy in Philadelphia, where he was born in 1823, he had a longing for a life of adventure that expressed itself in a boyish desire to become a marine. With maturity this passed, but the old enthusiasm for adventure remained. After graduation from Amherst he began theological training under the Reverend Dr. Albert Barnes, and the Reverend Dr. Thomas Brainard, both emi- nent divines of Philadelphia and friends of the Neill family. However, before his ordination to the ministry in 1848, young Neill taught school in Virginia at a point near Maryland. It was while here in 1847 that he married Miss Nancy Hall of Snow Hill, Maryland, and made his definite decision to go into the min- istry. But the pioneer spirit drew him west- ward and he chose to be ordained by the Presbytery of Galena, Illinois, the following year. Then for two years, from 1847 to 1849, he was a home missionary among the .miners at Elizabeth, Illinois. It was at the end of this time that the old lure of the unexplored again seized him, and he requested the School Missionary Board to send him to the new ter- ritory just north of Iowa. It was characteristic of the man that after receiving the commission he took the first boat for the new territory. 0 Q O Q 0 4 'N ' ffww-lf N '557b6T'567f5t Y