Wabash College - Wabash Yearbook (Crawfordsville, IN)

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NX.. Hgfie Urzegaqaecfeci, Because of God. EX-PRICSIDENT TUTTLE. 1111: ROMAN HISTORIAN asserts the pleasure of tracing a river to its source. I desire to trace Wabash College to the fountain from which it flows. When,Sir Walter Mildmay said, referring to the origin of Emanuel College, Cambridge, Eng.: I have set an acorn, which, when it becomes an oak, God alone knows what will be the fruit thereof, he expressed the Roman's thought by another figure of speech. In one it was a river, in the other an oak, but in each case the result came from a cause. In November, 1832, the Rev. James Thomson, and sev- eral men of like mind, set an acorn in the wilderness at Crawfordsville. a young town of a few hundred people. The Indians had re- cently sold the land, over which wild beasts still roamed. In 1821 its first white family came. In 1822, Rev. Charles C. Beattie preached the first Presbyterian sermon and solemnized the first marriage. In 1824, the first Presbyterian Church was organized, and, in 1827, the Rev. James Thomson became its pastor. He was a graduate of Miami University, in its first class, in 1826. While in the University, he formed the purpose of setting an acorn, of Sir Walter Mildmay's kind, somewhere in Wabash valley. This he did November 21, 1832. He and his fellow enthusiasts in the sublime undertaking, were home missionaries who had little money but a large wealth of faith. In one year from the starting of the work the first college edifice was sufficiently advanced to allow the first school to commence. 'Prof. Caleb Mills, December 3, 1833, began it with twelve students. In another twelve months the institution had shown enough vitality to get itself deep-hopelessly some thought-in debt. '

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7 .- -Y--.--- . kph N, sf' A xx ' 'K V1 The Rev. Edmund O. Hovey, one of the original convention, was sent east in May, 1834, to solicit aid. To further this e11d he was also sent by his Pres- bytery as a Commissioner to the General Assembly at Philadelphia. At Cinci11- nati, Philadelphia, New York and Boston, he found every door and purse closed. More distressing still, he found himself unable to open them. In despair, and with not enough money even to take him home, Mr. Hovey, then in Boston, wrote his resignation. He did not sign or send it, because just then the door opened, and his friend, the Rev. John M. Ellis, who had helped set the acorn, came in with a cheery salutation, which changed the situation radically, and the outcome was a trip to Andover to tell his story to the Theological Faculty, a grand body of men, bent on taking captive for Christ, not only the West, but the world. It is said Mr. Hovey told the story eH'ectively, and that Dr. Leon- ard Woods voiced the advice of the Faculty that the agent go to the country churches of New England, for the hard times had not yet reached them. The advice bore its first fruit the next Sabbath at Amesbury Mills, where Mr. Hovey received the first gift of his mission, sixty dollars a11d twenty-five cents! It was a great incident. As Dr. Beecher said, it was as sunlight shining on the bosom of a black cloud fleeing away. Victor Hugo explains the victory of Waterloo by the famous sentence, It was the unexpected, because of God! H T he uneapeciea' ! We are not done with it yet. It is the key of these paragraphs concerning the history of Wabash sixty years. During four months Professor Hovey had been telling to the country churches of Massachusetts the story that had captivated the Andover Faculty, and they gave him in cold cash fifteen hundred dollars. It seemed to him and those at home as if the Bank of England was unloading its boundless wealth at the door of the little college somewhere in the Wabash valley. But the God whom these men had worshiped that winter morning, Novem- ber 22, 1832, in the midst of nature's unbroken loveliness, was not yet through with them. He had opened on their delighted visio11 one UUNEX- PECTEDQ' and now He would give them the sight of another. It was in November, 1834. Let me introduce it. When Professor Hovey, in June, had sought aid in New York, among those who declined to give was Joshua Leavitt, one of the greatest journalists of his day. He gave no money, but he gave the agent this advice, to secure a President for his collegef' And what advice it was in the case! Even Southern Indiana then had a sparse and POOY population, scattered through its counties. A large moiety of it was still 2