"Friendly to the Enterprise"

The Nativity of Amherst College in a Massachusetts Country Town

It is a fact well documented, long acknowledged and perennially celebrated: Amherst College owes its existence not to some liberal plan of one or more enterprising men, nor to some zealous missionary or well-organized religious order; but rather to the liberal vision, extraordinary will and pooled resources of the townspeople of Amherst and its surrounding communities. This was a people, as Noah Webster described them in 1820, “whose moral, religious and literary habits, dispose them to cherish the cultivation of the mind, and the propagation of evangelical truth” (Noah Webster, “A Plea for a Miserable World,” 8). For, let’s face it: the mere geography of the town has never had a great deal to recommend itself for any enterprise beyond agriculture, and so it would have probably been destined to remain a quiet farming community. What first distinguished Amherst was an indigenous ambition for higher education, and it is the legacy of this ambition that makes it a center of learning today.

But to begin at the beginning: Amherst College was the outgrowth of Amherst Academy, which was first conceived in 1812 as a private secondary school intended as an ambitious step up from the rather primitive district schoolhouses. A subscription fund was established from within the community, mainly through the energies of a number of influential men. It opened for instruction on December 5, 1814 in a three-story brick building occupying a half-acre site on Amity Street directly across from the present-day Jones Library. In 1816 its success was assured when it was granted a state charter. By 1821, its enrollment was 169 (girls as well as boys), just slightly less than that of the venerable Phillips Academy in Andover. Its female students included Mary Lyon of nearby Buckland (later the founder of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary) and a local girl, Emily Dickinson; many of the male students went on to enroll at Amherst College, for which, indeed, the Academy eventually came to serve as something of a “feeder” school.

Although Amherst Academy eventually declined and was gone by 1868, its excellence and prosperity over several decades exceeded the town’s expectations. But quite apart from its effectiveness in educating local children, its lasting significance, of course, was its role in the founding of Amherst College. This came about in 1817 when the Academy’s trustees established a Charity Fund to provide the financial means to educate “indigent young men of promising talents and hopeful piety, who shall manifest a desire to obtain a liberal education with a sole view to the Christian ministry.” It seems that at first the idea was to solicit funds for a special program within the Academy to train young men for the ministry. Col. Rufus Graves, most especially, was instrumental in seeking support for this, but it soon became clear that such a restricted plan did not attract enough interest. What is inspiring here is that when faced with this setback, the Trustees did not, as might reasonably be expected, scale back their ambitions. To the contrary! They concluded that an even bolder plan was required, that nothing short of a completely new institution – a college of higher education – would be supported.

But then there was the small matter of Williams College. Established in 1793, it found itself struggling after two decades in existence, mainly because of its remote location in the Berkshires. Independently, Williams’ Trustees had already entertained a notion to move farther east. Professor Edward Hitchcock later summarized the situation perceptively: “As a majority of the [Williams] trustees were opposed to its removal, the subject was allowed to rest for three years, long enough to convince both parties that they were right.” Then, in 1818, the constitution of the “Charitable Institution” in Amherst was drafted and included, in its first article, a proposal that Williams should be incorporated into the new institution, provided that Williams considered this expedient. This overture received no official response from the Williams authorities, indicating their deep disagreement. Williams President Zephaniah Swift Moore gave to understand that he accepted the position with the understanding that the college would be moved. Over the course of the next two years, earnest and somewhat confusing negotiations took place among the interested parties (Williams, Amherst Academy, the citizens of their respective towns, and their representatives in the legislature): speeches, pamphlets and town meetings, arguments and counter-arguments, offers and counter-offers. A Williams contingent investigated the possibility of relocating to Northampton, and made an offer to the Amherst Academy trustees to unite with them there; when Amherst replied with enthusiasm for the concept of this union, but with none at all for its location, Williams resolved to pursue the Northampton option alone. In 1819, however, its attempt to seek permission from the General Court was blocked by none other than the citizens of Williamstown (silent until this time), who successfully persuaded the government to declare the removal “neither lawful nor expedient.” Williams would stay in Williamstown – thus eliminating the (almost certainly lethal) threat to the prospects of a new college in Amherst. (And happily, Williams’ fortunes gradually found a more secure footing, which it maintains to this day.)

And so began the work began of raising a sum of $50,000 for the Charity Fund and of securing land, labor and raw materials to build the first edifice of what was referred to early on simply as the “Amherst Charity Institution.” Raising $50,000 was no small feat at that time, given recent storms in the economic climate. The Trustees of Amherst Academy, who became the Trustees of Amherst College, appealed to citizens from far beyond Amherst to support their new project. A letter from Noah Webster to William Leffingwell of New Haven in 1820 captures the urgency and ardor of those early, hopeful times:

We are erecting by voluntary contributions a building of a hundred feet in length. The burden of this falls on the inhabitants of this neighborhood. Labor and materials are supplied cheerfully, but some money is necessary. In the present state of markets, the people in the country cannot get money. We want our Christian friends in this and the neighboring states to take an interest in this Great Enterprise, which has for its object the common benefit of the world, and we do hope that this infant institution will grow up to a size which shall contribute to check the progress of errors which are propagated from Cambridge.

The “errors” of Cambridge refer, presumably, to the tenets of Unitarianism then in favor at Harvard, which would have been considered heresy by the predominantly conservative Congregationalist Christians of Western Massachusetts. However, it’s a good bet that Webster, in his letter, is exaggerating the seriousness of their religious differences, perhaps in an effort to appeal to the sentiments of his correspondent, because another one of the astonishing things about the origins of Amherst College is that the founders, comprising a mix of Christian, educational and civic leaders, though they envisioned an institution with a definite evangelical character, never insisted that the new college be affiliated with any particular religious creed.

The self-sacrifice by local townspeople for the establishment of the College came in many forms – if not in pledges of money, then in whatever form they could give. Accounts of the community’s “enlightened self-interest” and teamwork in the two years leading up to the laying of the cornerstone of South College in 1820 suggest the cooperative spirit of an Amish barn-raising. The following anonymous reminiscence (reprinted in a Christian publication of 1872) is especially evocative:

One mortgages his farm, and one gives the hardly saved earnings of the years of his manhood, others give what they can of materials and labor; and the hard working, economical housewife and her industrious daughters spin, and knit, and weave and work to contribute something to this labor of duty and of love. But the hardy yeomen that come to Amherst to put into the walls the labor of their hands must have food while there, and the good people of that village, who are friendly to the enterprise, are “hard put to it” to meet their wants.

Within a year, the Charity Fund had received subscriptions of $37,244 from 274 contributors, ranging in sums from eight dollars to $3,000. Contributions of labor and materials are much harder to know and have been susceptible to a fair bit of myth-making, but probably the bulk came from nearby: Amherst citizens. The most critical element was the plot of land where the new college would be erected. Colonel Elijah Dickinson, of Amherst, a member of First Church and a selectman, transferred a plot of ten acres in May, 1818. These ten acres (nearly half of which were then covered with timber) formed the nucleus of the College’s later land acquisitions.

At its opening, Amherst College enrolled 47 students, 15 of which had come east from Williams with its former president Zephaniah Swift Moore when Moore – still convinced that Williams’ remaining in the remote Berkshires was a bad idea – accepted Amherst’s offer to serve as its first president. The new college soon prospered, and in the 1830s it had the second largest enrollment of any American college (behind Yale).

Today, Amherst College maintains a tradition of gratitude for the early sacrifices of its neighbors, and it endeavors to maintain an open, welcoming face on the community it is part of, as demonstrated in numerous outreach programs. And while the identical purple color scheme of Amherst and Williams Colleges is said to reflect the notion that “Amherst was born of Williams,” it is equally if not more accurate to say that it was born of Amherst – and of its Hampshire County neighbors.

Peter Nelson
Amherst College Library