Category Archives: Founders

Founders’ Day

by Rick Teller '70, Williston Northampton Archivist
The cover to a Founder’s Day invitation, 1895

According to most evidence, Williston Seminary began to celebrate Founders’ Day shortly after Samuel Williston’s death in 1874.  The original tradition was to commemorate the Founder on or close to his birthday, June 17.  Typically it was one element of Senior Week, which culminated with graduation exercises.  It was a major event.  The oldest surviving program, from 1895, presents a full afternoon of wreath-laying and speeches.

The Founders’ Day program, 1895.

Some form of the event survived into the 1970s.   By mid-century, it had been moved to a date earlier in the spring.  The school assembled at the Williston gravesite in the Main Street Cemetery, where either the Headmaster or Dean A. L. Hepworth would talk about the Willistons, and typically many of the other former heads and faculty interred nearby.

At the gravesite, probably 1970. Headmaster Phillips Stevens and Chaplain Roger A. Barnett.
May, 1966. Teacher Peter Rowe lays a wreath on Emily Williston’s grave. Other identifiable faculty include, from left, Frank Putnam, Yves Couderc (center, behind Mr. Rowe), Daniel Carpenter, A. L. Hepworth, Wilmot Babcock (partially obscured), and Alan Shaler (on the right margin).

In 2016, during Williston Northampton’s 175th Anniversary celebration, Founders’ Day was revived, now as a February event celebrating the tradition of giving that was so much a part of who Samuel and Emily Williston were.  It has become a major element in the School’s annual Advancement effort.  On February 20, 2019, our goal was to inspire 1,178 donors — for Williston’s 178th year.  Achieving that participation target triggered an additional $75,000 challenge grant, while several classes and the Williston Parents created incentives of their own.  By the end of the day we had vastly exceeded expectations, as nearly 1,400 alumni, parents, faculty, students, and friends realized almost $400,000.

Joesph Sawyer, ca. 1909.

For Headmaster Joseph Henry Sawyer, who joined the faculty in 1866 and led the school from 1884-1886 and 1895-1919, Founders’ Day was especially meaningful.  After all, he had known Emily and Samuel Williston personally, as well as most of the other major figures from the school’s early years.  In 1911 his friend Herbert M. Plimpton, class of 1878, published several of Sawyer’s Founders’ Day addresses.

June 17, 1909, fell on the same day as Commencement, so much of the traditional Founders’ Day speechifying was curtailed.  But Sawyer, in his graduation remarks to the senior class, included a few words —actually, more than a few — about Samuel Williston.  While the religious element Sawyer evokes is de-emphasized in 21st-century Williston Northampton, much of what Sawyer had to say seems especially relevant for students and alumni today.  The text, from Plimpton’s compilation, is reproduced below.  (Please click the images to enlarge them.)x

Mark Hopkins on Education (1841)

by Rick Teller '70, Williston Northampton Archivist
Williston Seminary in 1841, at the time of its dedication. The single school building, the neoclassical “White Seminary,” is at right. Next to it is the “Town Hall,” formerly the Meeting House, but no longer functioning as such since the construction of the First Congregational Church, at left, in 1836. At this time there were no buildings on the west side of Main Street. The Village Green and Seminary Grounds extended down to the Manhan River.
Mark Hopkins (National Cyclopedia of American Biography, 1892)

On December 1, 1841, Williston Seminary opened its doors to its first group of students.  For the dedication address, Samuel Williston invited the Rev. Mark Hopkins (1802-1887), President of Williams College, Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy, and one of the nation’s leading thinkers on education and educational reform.  Hopkins was known as a gifted teacher, who favored Socratic engagement over lectures.  One of his Williams protégés, President James A. Garfield, commented that an ideal college comprised “Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other.”

True to the oratorical tradition of the time, Hopkins spoke for well over an hour.  His subject was the condition of education in the United States, of the need for a variety of reforms, and how Williston Seminary, of which he was a founding Trustee, might address them.  It is a fascinating and valuable document.  (Readers who wish copies of the full text may email the archivist.)

One passage, on pages 7 and 8 of the printed speech, concerns the importance of an educated citizenry, arguing that anything less constitutes a danger to democracy itself.  It is reproduced below.   Notwithstanding the optimism of the last excerpted sentence, Hopkins’ words continue to resonate, 176 years after he spoke them.

A portion of page 7
A portion of page 8

“A man whose God laughs little . . .”

by Rick Teller '70, Williston Northampton Archivist

A recent social media discussion among members of the Class of 1968 recalled Horace Thorner, English master from 1943 to 1970, a scholar whose breadth of interests and talents was truly extraordinary.  Thorner was a poet of frequent insight and technical virtuosity.  Some of his work has already appeared on this blog.  (See “The Round World Squared.”

For the school’s 125th anniversary in 1966, Thorner was asked to write a celebratory “Ode to Williston.”  Commemorative poetry is tricky; it is hard to avoid either hyperbole or mawkishness.  Thorner was reasonably — though not entirely — successful.  But his chapter on founder Samuel Williston is especially perceptive; Thorner, writing for an audience that perhaps expected the old hagiographic legend, captures the essential conflicts in the man better than others have managed using many more words (see “The Button Speech” ).

II. The Founder

Who was this man?  There is no simple rule
     To separate the warm flesh and the blood
From such another statue, pale and cool,

As since the time of ancient Athens stood
     In lifeless grandeur in the public square,
Defying time and tempest, lightning, flood,

But never living, never quite the bare,
     The unadorned, the simple human truth,
Standing in unabashed completeness there.

Indeed, he was ambitious as a youth,
     A start for marble statues, but God's will
To spoil his eyes left him uncouth,

Compared to what he wanted for his goal,
     To preach, just as his father had, to strive
With old New England devils for the soul.

He had his children, none of whom would live,
     And felt God's wrath, but trusted and was brave,
Adopted others Emily would love —

A stern man but a just one and no slave
     To outward polish in his speech or act,
Never forgetting that his father gave

A life of service to the church, a fact
     That well accounts for all the generous years
He took such care his parish never lacked.

We see the flesh through marble, know his fears
     To board a ship on Sunday well may show
A man whose God laughed little, lived on tears.

He may have driven bargains hard.  We know
     The history of most great fortunes proves
The man who rises, steps on some below,

And afterwards he finds that it behooves
     That he appease his conscience by his tithes.
Some great philanthropists had cloven hooves.

But whether conscience prospers or it writhes,
     The good it does lives after it, and so
They well deserve their shining laurel wreathes.

Williston wrote his conscience long ago
     Into the charter of his school.  The words
Still shine upon the fading page and glow

With all the brightness of crusader's swords.
     "Knowledge without goodness" — so they read —
"Is powerless to do good."  The phrase affords

An insight to the sturdy heart and head
     Of Williston, for they were words he chose,
Although, indeed, they had been elsewhere said.

On this foundation, then, the school arose
     Between the winding river and the hill
That speak God's strength in action and repose.

Horace E. Thorner
Naples, Italy, February 1966

All eight sections of Horace Thorner’s “Ode to Williston” are too long to publish here.  Readers who would like copies of the entire poem may email archives@williston.com.

Samuel Williston

The Quotable Sammy

by Rick Teller '70, Williston Northampton Archivist

WNS15ALM10_175l small lr

[Looking for links to the posts cited in the Spring 2017 Williston Northampton Bulletin?  Please click “Ford Hall Turns 100” and “Worms.”]

Recently one of our better students asked me whether I knew of any good quotes from Samuel Williston that he could insert into a term paper.  “Don’t know,” I responded.  “What’s the paper about?”  “Doesn’t matter,” he said; “I’ll work them in.”  Suppressing my instinct to initiate a conversation about such pedantries as relevance, context, and provenance — the kid was, after all, in a hurry — I dug out a document prepared at the request of former Head of School Brian Wright back in 1991, and in reviewing it, realized that it was good blog fodder.  So . . . here is Samuel Williston (the fodder of us all), in his own words.

415_1125b LR“Whereas God in His Providence has bestowed upon me a goodly portion of this world’s possessions, which I ought to use for His glory, for the dissemination of the Gospel of the blessed Redeemer, and for the greatest good of my fellow-men — and, whereas, I desire to be instrumental in promoting the cause of correct and thorough literary and Christian education, and for that purpose have lately followed an Institution which is established at Easthampton, Massachusetts, and incorporated by the name ‘Williston Seminary’ […]”  Preamble, Constitution of Williston Seminary, 1845

(Williston founded his Seminary in 1841, but it took him four more years to publish his thoughts about what he was attempting.  See “The Constitution of Williston Seminary” for more detail.)

“Believing, that the image and glory of an all-wise and holy God are most brightly reflected in the knowledge and holiness of his rational creatures, and that the best interests of our country, the church, and the world are all involved in the intelligence, virtue, and piety of the rising generation; desiring also, if possible, to bring into existence some permanent agency, that shall live, when I am dead, and extend my usefulness to remote ages, I have thought I could in no other way more effectually serve God or my fellow-men, than by devoting a portion of the property which he has given me, to the establishment and ample endowment of an Institution, for the intellectual, moral and religious education of youth.” Continue reading