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Back in 1824, nearly five decades after the 13 American colonies declared their independence from Great Britain, the Revolution’s young French hero, the Marquis de Lafayette, returned for a “farewell tour.”
“Everywhere he went during the 14-month tour, he was hailed as a hero,” College Archivist Diane Windham Shaw told a packed room during a Reunion Weekend talk Saturday afternoon.
Not to be outdone, a group of Easton citizens led by James Madison Porter set out for Philadelphia in high-sided Durham boats—the kind used by George Washington to cross the Delaware—to catch a glimpse of the Marquis and hear him speak.
In the wake of Lafayette’s visit, Shaw said, there was “sort of a frenzy of honorific naming” of towns, streets, buildings, and schools for the war hero.
And so, when Porter took the lead in suggesting the founding of a college in Easton later that year, the name Lafayette was an obvious choice.
Very little else in the College’s long road to becoming reality was anywhere near as easy. From the first meeting in December 1824, arguments abounded about how the college would be run, what subjects would be taught, where it would be located, whether religion should play a role, and even whether whoever became president would be paid.
Finally, Shaw said, a solution came from an unlikely source—the Rev. George Junkin, a Presbyterian minister and head of the Manual Labor Academy at Germantown in Philadelphia, agreed to become Lafayette’s first president, and to bring most of his students to help form the new school.
And so, Shaw said, although the founding board had previously agreed that military science would be taught and that clergy should not play a role in order to prevent the new school from becoming “priest ridden,” a program of manual labor (in addition to academic study) replaced the planned military science curriculum, and Junkin was elected president Feb. 6, 1832.
“The new College would be nothing like it was envisioned,” Shaw said, and quoted the words of David Bishop Skillman ’13 in his Biography of a College: “Thus did Lafayette beat her swords into plowshares and her spears into pruning hooks.”
Junkin’s students walked north from Philadelphia with their belongings on their backs, Aaron Hoff 1836 formally declared the College open by blowing a horn, and 67 students, including 11 who commuted from their homes, began their studies. The students were taught by a mathematics professor and a classics professor.
“The tuition was $30 a year,” said Shaw, adding that lodging was $4 per year, while meals were $1.50 per week, or $1.25 at the “cheap table.”
The food, according to a letter written by Alexander Ramsey 1836, who eventually became United States Secretary of War, was “such as beggars all description.”
Ramsey wrote, “At breakfast we have coffee (so-called), sometimes a mackerel of the herring species, appropriated to about eighteen persons, a little cold meat in the same proportion, and bread and rank butter. At dinner beef, potatoes unskinned, water and dry bread. Supper a decoction of tea in warm water, bread and molasses.”
Shaw added more levity with another excerpt from a Ramsey letter: “I had but two pair of pantaloons along, and Oh Horriden!!! on descending the hill in front of the college I fell and tore one of them past all redemption, so that one pair at this time has to answer me for Sunday-go-to-meeting dress and work pants.”
In 1839, the College dropped the manual labor aspect of its curriculum—it was becoming too expensive to buy equipment and enrollment had risen to a point where it was difficult to keep all students occupied.
The next 70 years proved difficult, and the College nearly closed many times. Perhaps the worst crisis occurred in 1863, when the call for volunteers to serve in the Civil War dropped enrollment to 50 students.
“Most of the 19th century was pretty tricky, and we’re lucky to be here,” Shaw said. “But we certainly are flourishing now, thanks to all of you.”