Wabash College - Wabash Yearbook (Crawfordsville, IN)

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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

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wilderness. It had not a single city of considerable size. The northern half was worse off. North of the Wabash, outside of Fort Wayne and Logansport, there were not three hundred white inhabitants. It was one vast wilderness with few settlers. Indianapolis was a small town. The State was in its rudest conditions. Houses, farms, roads and the adjuncts of advancing, but pioneer, population were rude and primitive. And this great New York editor advised Mr. Hovey as an absolute necessity of success to secure a President for the infant college in such surroundings as have been described. It must have seemed to the agent, when he heard it, a cruel joke, or, at best, an empty pleasantry. But it was not. joshua Leavitt was not that sort of a man. He was in dead earnest in this as in other things. The statement will illustrate the mission of Professor Hovey to New York in November, 1834. His attention had already been directed to the Rev. Elisha Whittlesy Baldwin, of New York, as the right man for the place. He was a native of Greene county, New York, a devout and wide-awake Christian, a ready scholar, an alumnus of Yale 1812, and Andover 1817, a successful teacher and 1820-32 the honored pastor of a large Presbyterian church in a populous but extremely destitute and immoral portion of New York. This church was chiefly the result of his own labors through large and constant accessions-one hundred and seventy-five in one year. The reputation thus gained was further intensified by his heroic conduct during one season of yellow fever epidemic and another of cholera. In each case he remained at his post to cheer and assist the sick and the dying. He was not only a brave and sweet Christian minister, but he was a ready and attractive preacher, greatly honored in the large congre- gations of New York and New jersey. He also had a charming family, consisting of a wife, son and two daughters, who greatly relished the privileges of city life. This was the man who, by the advice of the best men in the metropolis, was to be visited by Prof. Hovey, to invite him to accept the Presidency of the Wabash College. Let the intelligent reader reproduce the elements which make up the picture of the Indiana, the Crawfordsvillef' and U the Wabash College of November, 1834, and then imagine the agent at the door of the city pastor's home in East Broadway! Could it have been otherwise than that Professor Hovey must have felt his heart sink as he placed in the 1l1l11lStCI',S hands an invitation to leave his position in New York to take one in Indiana, the hard and narrow circumstances of which he himself had had such thorough experience? How little reason had he to