Then as now, April is mud season in Maine, and travel to Augusta was likely difficult for those founding trustees. For that or other reasons, by the meeting\u2019s scheduled start time of 10 a.m., only 14 of Cheney\u2019s 28 trustees\u2014 one shy of the required majority\u2014 had arrived for the meeting.<\/p>\n
The location of the meeting, in Augusta, at a new Freewill Baptist church on State Street for which Cheney served as pastor, typified the resolve that Cheney would bring to bear in founding Bates.<\/p>\n
Three years earlier, the little church was in disarray and had already disbanded once. Yet Cheney agreed to be its pastor. “The call here had little money in it,” recalled Cheney, “hardly enough to keep soul and body together, and the hardest of work.”<\/p>\n
Appointed in June 1852, Cheney immediately raised money for a new building, which was funded, built, and dedicated, debt-free, just 17 months later at a cost of $5,600.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2019\/04\/43-State-Street-Augusta-131210-900x387.jpg\")
<\/a>This tree-filled yard (center) on State Street in Augusta is the likely location of the Freewill Baptist Church and the first meeting of the trustees of the Maine State Seminary on April 5, 1855. (Jay Burns\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n
Minus one trustee needed for a majority, Cheney didn’t just sit and stew. He sent a text, 1800s style, firing off a telegram to one wayward trustee, Joshua Haskell, in Topsham, about 30 miles south. \u201cWe lack one trustee to make a majority \u2014 come in the next train,\u201d Cheney pleaded.<\/p>\n
Luckily, a 15th trustee (not Haskell) soon breezed through the door of the Freewill Baptist church, and the meeting got underway. Lasting until 11 p.m., it was \u201charmonious and pleasant without exception,\u201d Cheney said, noting that the trustees adjourned the meeting knowing that an existential decision, choosing the school\u2019s location<\/a>, awaited them at their next meeting in June.<\/p>\n Oren Cheney famously kept his eyes on the prize: to found a new Maine college. (Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)<\/p><\/div>\n When you\u2019re trying to launch a new college, as Oren Cheney was doing on this day in 1855, you sweat the details. A former member of the Maine Legislature, Cheney had famously kept watch over the bill for the seminary charter as it made its way through the Legislature, hand-delivering the bill to the governor\u2019s office for signing the month before.<\/p>\n You also don\u2019t suffer fools, and you watch your money.<\/p>\n So naturally, Cheney didn\u2019t forget about the cable he’d sent to Brunswick (the closest telegraph office to Topsham), nor the 20 cents he\u2019d spent on it.<\/p>\n Turns out, the telegraph office had dumped Cheney\u2019s urgent message into the outgoing mail rather than deliver it immediately to Haskell. \u201cThere it remained for hours until the cars [trains] had passed,\u201d Cheney wrote in his regular column in The Morning Star<\/em>, a Baptist newspaper.<\/p>\n Indeed, Cheney devoted a good portion of his April 18 column to calling out the Brunswick telegraph office. \u201cWe mention this to put the public on guard,\u201d he wrote. \u201cWe can send a letter to Brunswick for 3 cents \u2014 the dispatch cost 20 \u2014 and both of them, in the case presented, would be money thrown away.\u201d<\/p>\n As for the Freewill meetinghouse at 43 State St., it is long gone. The church merged with another Baptist church in Augusta in the 1920s to form the Penney Memorial United Baptist Church.<\/p>\n What remains on the site today is a wooded lot between two historic buildings that also date to the mid-1800s. After the church merger, the building was later home to a building contractor (whose structures, among others, included “car barns,” for trolley cars) and, by the 1920s, an Oldsmobile dealership.<\/p>\n It was razed some time after 1936, as it is mentioned as still standing in the college history Bates College and Its Background.<\/em><\/p>\n Sources for this story included the Kennebec Historical Society<\/a>, Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library<\/a>, the\u00a0Lithgow Public Library<\/a> in Augusta, and the Bureau of Assessing<\/a> in Augusta.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When you’re launching a new college, as Oren Cheney was doing on this day in 1855, you sweat the details, you don\u2019t suffer fools, and you watch your money.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":104,"featured_media":123468,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","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":""},"categories":[32,224,11009],"tags":[1444,11161],"class_list":["post-123461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-maine-and-new-england","category-society-culture","category-the-college","tag-bates-history","tag-oren-cheney"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/104"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123461"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123461\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":123539,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123461\/revisions\/123539"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/123468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2017\/06\/b901993a5e2a8343a4ca3c7bfff15d91-250x300.jpeg\")
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