{"id":98,"date":"2010-03-22T18:21:02","date_gmt":"2010-03-22T18:21:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hub-dev.bates.edu\/150years\/november-1854-oren-cheney-takes-a-step-toward-a-new-college\/"},"modified":"2019-10-03T14:02:28","modified_gmt":"2019-10-03T18:02:28","slug":"a-new-college","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/150-years\/months\/november\/a-new-college\/","title":{"rendered":"November 1854: Oren Cheney takes a step toward a new college"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/a>
Oren B. Cheney, Founder, First President of Bates College, 1855-1894<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

A series of baby steps, rather than a single “shazam!” moment, led to the founding of Bates College. One step was taken on Nov. 22, 1854, in Topsham, Maine. At a Free Will Baptist educational convention, Oren Cheney went public with his vision for a new Maine school, exhorting fellow church leaders to seek from the Maine Legislature money and a charter for a new “literary institution.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In scale, the school would be “somewhere between an academy and a college,” Cheney wrote before the convention. The only Free Will school in Maine, a seminary at Parsonsfield where Cheney had once served as principal, had burned in September, thus the need for a new Free Will school, Cheney wrote, “haunts us sleeping and waking…. Let us arise and build, brethren; at any rate, let us try \u2014 this can do no harm \u2014 not until we have tried <\/em>can we submit to a failure.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And as he rallied his cause in the pages of The Morning Star,<\/em> a Free Will Baptist newspaper for which he served as an editor, Cheney, with some prescience, even set the stage for what would become, years later, a lively three-school rivalry. Cheney compared the state’s land-and-cash support for a Congregationalist college (Bowdoin) and a Calvinist Baptist one (Colby, then known as Waterville College) with what the Free Will Baptists had gotten from the state: “a trifle.” (At that time in Maine, the population of Free Will Baptists was about two-thirds the total of Congregationalists and about equal to the number of Calvinist Baptists, according to Cheney’s estimates.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The educational convention agreed with Cheney, resolving to “concentrate…efforts in the establishment of a literary institution of such a character as shall meet the wants…of the denomination throughout the state.” Four months later, in March 1855, the Legislature granted a charter for the Maine State Seminary, to be founded by Free Will Baptists but open to all men and women  \u2014 the forerunner of Bates College.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A series of baby steps, rather than a single “shazam!” moment, led…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"parent":87,"menu_order":4,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"class_list":["post-98","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/150-years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/98","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/150-years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/150-years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/150-years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/150-years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/150-years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/98\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2210,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/150-years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/98\/revisions\/2210"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/150-years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/87"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/150-years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}