History of Parsonsfield Seminary:
1932 Centennial Edition

Mary Freeman, September, 2002

The founding of Parsonsfield Seminary and its history for one hundred years, the high grade of the courses of study offered from the first, and the large numbers of superior young men and women who have attended the school--all illustrate the high regard for learning that the people of New England have had from the very beginning. And this regard was simply the continuation of the love of learning which the early settlers brought with them out of England into the wilderness. It is a satisfaction to know that our part of America was settled by people of good quality and culture, some of them landed gentry in England, many of them graduates of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The tradition that learning is a good thing and that it should be free to all the people has come down to us, from 1620 to 1932 without interruption.

In the first years, the first two or three decades of the Massachusetts settlement (you remember that when Parsonsfield was settled it was in Massachusetts), the teaching of children was left to the parents in the home. But very early a law was enacted by the General Court of the Colony which gave the Selectman of each town the right and the duty to inquire of parents, and actually to ascertain, how well the children were being taught; whether they were being taught, not only to read, but also to understand religion and the important civil laws. And before the colony was fifty years old, a law, which has become the corner stone of the American public school system, was passed requiring the employment of teachers for public elementary schools. Moreover, every town of one hundred or more householders was required to provide a grammar school, so called, a school of somewhat higher grade, which should fit youths for entrance to the university (meaning Harvard University). It is plain that the pioneers of New England meant to open wide the road to higher learning, and to the highest learning, for all the people.

Mr. Horace Piper has given in his admirable paper on the schools of Parsonsfield, in the town history, interesting pictures of the hardships endured by the school children of the early years.

At first schools were held in private houses. The first separate buildings for schools were--at least some of them--log houses, heated in winter only by open fireplaces, before which the smaller children on the front benches roasted, and the older youths in the back seats shivered with cold. And this was not long ago; these rude conditions were what our forefathers endured a very few generations back. In these days of automobiles, telephones, radios and electric refrigerators, it is hard to remember that in the childhood of the grandparents of some of us here today, stoves and kerosene lamps were actually unknown in their homes and scarcely dreamed of.

In the years just preceding 1830 there were made, in this town, the first efforts toward offering to the people the means of instruction in studies of high school grade. One term high schools were held in various parts of the town, giving courses in history, astronomy, natural philosophy, rhetoric, algebra, and the Latin language. For example, a high school taught by one Bion Bradbury in Middle Road in the year 1830. To the success of this high school, the historian, Horace Piper, attributes the immediate impulse leading to the establishment of a permanent high school to be maintained throughout the year, offering all the courses usually taught in the academies, and fitting students for college. Prominent men of the town, and especially of North Parsonsfield, were interested in the project. The school they organized, and which was opened on the first Monday of September in 1832, they called Parsonsfield Seminary.

Look back for a moment at the neighborhood of North Parsonsfield in the year 1832. The township had been surveyed for Thomas Parsons, you remember, in 1771, and settlers began to come in almost immediately. The part we call North Road was, however, covered with unbroken forest until 1779. Then the first settler here, Amos Blazo, veteran of the Revolution, came with his family of ten sons. He and his sons cleared the first land in this vicinity. That is, this land upon which the first Seminary building was erected in 1832 had been primeval, virgin forest only fifty-three years before.

In these fifty years forests had been turned to farms, the population of Parsonsfield had increased very rapidly--probably to at least two thousand people in 1830. Industry, mostly farming, was thriving, people were prosperous. Some of them by the year 1820 had built large and rather expensive houses from funds they had accumulated, it seems, by local industry. Through the main street of North Parsonsfield, the east and west road, moved teams hauling freight from New Hampshire toward Portland and Boston, with occasional droves of cattle or sheep heading for the city markets, while stage coaches, gaily painted in bright colors (this was before the coming of the railroads) carried passengers between Biddeford and the parts of New Hampshire to the west of us--Madison, Tamworth, and Sandwich. The new Seminary stood thus near a busy artery of traffic of the times.

The men who were active in starting the new school were an interesting group. Three were ministers, of whom the chief was John Buzzell, minister of the church here and a prominent leader in the Free Baptist denomination, widely known for his writings and his evangelistic preaching tours through New England, a scholar, an eloquent preacher, and a forceful personality. One of his sermons is on record as having lasted for two hours and forty-five minutes. He was the first President of the Trustees.

One was the local physician, a man of wide reputation for skill in medicine and surgery, an eminent teacher of the healing art, Dr. Moses Sweat the first. He was for years the Secretary of the Board of Trustees.

Five were farmers living near, of whom we may mention Major Thomas Churchill, ancestor of the Churchills and most of the Lords of the present day, who lived at the top of the famous hill, a mile north of here. Three of the group were lawyers, namely, Robert T. Blazo, then practicing law in Moultonboro, New Hampshire, Honorable Nathan Clifford, and Honorable Rufus McIntire, of Middle Road, member of Congress and afterwards United States Marshall for the State of Maine. He was the person whose seizure some years later by men of New Brunswick up in Aroostook woods led to the skirmish of small states known as the Aroostook War.

School was started on the first Monday of September, 1832, with a large attendance. The first catalogue printed at the beginning of that year, lists the names of one hundred and forty students. There must, then, have been a building for recitations. But the land for it was conveyed by Robert Blazo in May 17 of the same year. The first Seminary, large enough to accommodate one hundred forty students, must have gone up in less than four months. There being no dormitory in the years 1833 and 1834, the students roomed in houses of the citizens of the town. Of the one hundred forty students, fifty-three were young men and women of Parsonsfield. Many residences are given as in New Hampshire, some as far away as Jackson, Holderness, Dover and Newcastle. One student came from Rhode Island and one from Ohio.

To find so many students attending at the very beginning, and coming from such distances, is surprising. It is probable that the close affiliation with the Free Will Baptist denomination explains the matter. Parsonsfield Seminary was regarded as a denominational school, was widely known through the religious papers, and the churches sent their young people here.

The first principal (he is called Preceptor) was Elder Hosea Quinby. He agreed to come for a salary of $400 a year--provided the tuitions amounted to so much. He too was an active and afterward an eminent Free Baptist preacher. The Baptist history says that Rev. Quinby preached in the Seminary Hall. He taught here for eight years.

The course of study given in the first catalog mentions the following subjects: all the Latin and French required for college entrance, Rhetoric, Ancient and Modern History, Intellectual Philosophy, Political Economy, Paley's Theological and Moral Philosophy, Logic, Philosophy of Natural History, Natural Philosophy, Geometry and Trigonometry, Navigation, Astronomy, Botany, and so forth. As the only teacher mentioned is Hosea Quinby, A.B., and there were one hundred and forty students to partake of this feast, either the service must have been on the cafeteria plan, or Hosea Quinby, A.B., must have been a very busy person. Possibly, however, there were subordinate teachers, too insignificant to mention.

The third principal was one Moses M. Smart. He conducted a Baptist Theological School in connection with the Seminary. Parsonsfield has therefore been the seat of an institution of higher learning. But in fact some years before the Seminary was started we had for a few years a Medical School, about 1817 to 1820, conducted by Dr. Moses Sweat the elder, aided by a Scotch physician, a well known anatomist, formerly of Edinburg University, one Dr. Ramsey. The doctors met their students in the Dr. Sweat house.

The Baptist Theological School of Professor Moses Smart seems to have strangled the Seminary, about which it twined for support. For when Mr. George H. Ricker, just graduated from Dartmouth College, came here as Principal in 1846, he found the school dead--as he says here in an address given here in 1885, no sessions had been held for a year. The Seminary, which started with such brilliant prospects, and an attendance of one hundred and forty students, in 1832, had thus, for reasons we cannot even guess at, come to a complete standstill in twelve or fourteen years.

Mr. Ricker came to take charge of the school in 1846. The buildings, he said, were in bad condition, the institution largely in debt. He opened school with nine scholars. He was principal for seven years and seems to have been a man to inspire everyone to hard work. The debt was paid off, the buildings were repaired and painted, the students increased to above one hundred.

Toward the end of the first quarter century of its history, the Seminary appears to have been in flourishing condition under Principal John A. Lowell. The catalog for 1854 gives the number of students as one hundred sixty three, of whom fifty eight were residents of Parsonsfield, representing the families of many of those here today. the remainder being from neighboring towns of Maine and New Hampshire; one was from South Carolina. Elder John Buzzell was still President of the Trustees, and Dr. Moses Sweat still Secretary. The first Seminary building was burned down on the morning of Thursday, September 21, 1854. Timber for the construction of the new Seminary, the one we are now assembled in, was at once freely offered by Colonel Hobbs, to be cut by the trustees from the Hobbs� farm on the South River, two miles to the west. On November 22, Dr. Sweat attended a Free Will Baptist Conference at Topsham and obtained a promise of $2000 towards the construction of the new Seminary. Clearly the school was then considered a school of the denomination. A number of solicitors were appointed to secure funds by private subscription. With the insurance money and the donations, it was decided in February of 1855, to start work on the new building. The building in which we are meeting today is, therefore, except for the North Wing, seventy seven years old this summer.

And this brings us to the end of the first quarter century.

Click here to go to SECOND QUARTER CENTURY, 1857-1882

Click here to go to THIRD QUARTER CENTURY, 1882-1907

Click here to go to FOURTH QUARTER CENTURY, 1907-1932

Click here to go to FIRST QUARTER CENTURY, 1832-1857

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