One week ago, nearly 500 members of Bates College’s Class of 2018 gathered for a convocation ceremony, and there were unmistakable echoes of the institution’s founding principles from 1855.

In those early years, enrolling both men and women in higher education was extremely radical, yet it was this new college in the small community of Lewiston, Maine, that was among the very first co-educational colleges in the nation.

Furthermore, its early history is distinguished by the recruitment and enrollment of African American students. That came at a time in American history when abolitionism was a dangerous stand to take.

Pre-Civil War sentiments were running hot on both sides of the issue.

One source of the college’s remarkable history is a book published in 1936. A review of “Bates College and its Background” by Dr. Alfred Williams Anthony, a trustee of the college, was printed in the Lewiston Evening Journal on May 16, 1936.

The review said, “Probably no one was so well-fitted, through familiarity with the college’s past and through contact with those who has a prominent part in it, to write such a history as he.”

Dr. Anthony wrote that Sept. 22, 1854, is the date on which its founder’s inspiration for today’s Bates College took place. That night, the Rev. Oren B. Cheney, pastor of the Free Baptist Church in Augusta, received a message that Parsonsfield Seminary had burned to the ground. To Cheney, the news was a shock and a vision because he had been schooled at that seminary and for a while he was its principal. He was determined to work for a replacement.

Cheney began tireless fundraising and soon secured a charter from the Maine Legislature for establishment of Maine State Seminary.

Dr. Anthony said Lewiston was chosen as the site of the new school because of the rapid expansion of railroads to the area. The school opened with about 20 students. Cheney was the first president of what was to become Bates College.

The college’s website says Bates initially attracted young men from New England’s hinterlands, but the charter, perhaps inspired as much by Cheney’s wife, Emeline, as by reformist idealism, specifically provided for the enrollment of females. Bates soon became something of a novelty, and subject to mean-spirited ridicule in Maine, as New England’s first co-educational college.

In his 1885 president’s report, Cheney wrote, “How much it cost the college in standing and influence to admit a woman … before it had graduated a class, I very well know.” That first female graduate of Bates was Mary W. Mitchell, Class of 1869.

It is “only a question of time” before “all the colleges of our country will welcome women to their numbers,” Cheney predicted.

The greatest passion of the Bates president was abolition of slavery. Like his father, Cheney participated in the Underground Railroad. It is said that he openly entertained in his home notable black leaders, such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, and enjoyed the personal friendship of one of the most ardent opponents of slavery in the U.S. Senate, Charles Sumner of Massachusetts.

The Bates website said Cheney tried to recruit black students. He traveled to Virginia just after the Civil War to find likely candidates. Bates would graduate its first black student in 1874. That was Henry Chandler, who, ironically, was a native Mainer.

By 1877, Bates had nine blacks enrolled, six of whom had been slaves.

In those days, Androscoggin County was even less diverse than the state as a whole with only 11 “colored” residents out of a population of 29,726 and none of these 11 African Americans lived in Lewiston or Auburn in 1860.

For an area with a population that was completely white in 1860, these nine African American students would have provided the first instances of racial diversity in the Lewiston or Auburn area.

The history of Bates College has been recorded in great detail, but it would seem the remarkable story is not as well known in its hometown as it should be. This column focuses on only a few facets of the Bates College story. Much more can found in books, newspaper articles and the college’s web site at www.bates.edu.

Dave Sargent is a freelance writer and a native of Auburn. He can be reached by sending email to dasargent@maine.com.

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