Lake Wobegon Days (8 page)

In this Parnassus of the prairie, the Rev. Dr. Watt was the leading citizen of his day, a cleric, scholar, poet, orator, and a man who, as someone said, “woke up each day and wrapped greatness like a cloak around him. On his daily constitutionals, Dr. Watt is impeded by neither mud nor livestock. Morning and evening, he sets forth on his accustomed round, prepared for magnificent and learned discourse. At the sight of an audience, even a solitary soul leaning against a fence or heading toward a privy, Dr. Watt will cross any street however miry and challenge oncoming horses or herds of swine in order to engage
his fellow man in scholarly exposition on the ideas of the day. Many are the citizens who have been thus engaged and, with little effort or expense on their part, profitably educated, for the Doctor is as unsparing of his wisdom as he is generous with his time.”

Profound as he was in public, Henry in his journal often gave way to bitter complaints against conditions in town, the mud in particular:

14 Apr. The 4th day of rain and we are up to our knees in mire and a man can’t cross the street but he may have to abandon his boots halfway across—this western soil, so highly advertised as an agricultural
paradiso
, is clay and loam in the exact proportion needed to make thick soup with only a little water needed—a day of dismal rain, mixed well by horse and wagon traffic, and a man is a prisoner in his house, surrounded by impassable swamp. An apt illustration of our spiritual condition here: hemmed in by despond & despair, life churned up by mere commerce and society—rode last week to the end of the lake. A magnificent site. High ground, well drained.
Firm
, even when wet. Natural clearing on hill, view of water & distant village. I am to speak to trustees again Wed. & must make a clear & strong argument. Perhaps my resignation will carry the day.

Henry had offered his resignation so many times, the trustees of the college had come to expect it; it was the first order of business at their meetings and was easily disposed of, since the price of his happiness was low. A little praise from them and a little money for a bell for the college belfry, a few dozen library books, a professor of rhetoric, and the letter of resignation disappeared into his pocket. What sold them on the new campus that spring was the wonderful effect it would have on the value of land nearby. All conceivable lots had been sold at the townsite, and now, with the college moving to the eastern end of the lake, the land around the new campus could be divided into lots and put on the market. Their delay in approving the plan was to gain time to buy up surrounding property; then they voted 5-2 to purchase a hundred acres from themselves for the college. The two opposed were gentlemen with no money to invest.

So anxious was Henry to move the college to the country, he had
completed a dedicatory ode before construction began, and on May 24, 1855, in the morning, the faculty (four) and students (now swelled to twenty-five) assembled in front of the lyceum, where the bell was placed on a wagon and, led by a small brass band and accompanied by half the citizenry, proceeded out the old Pender Road a mile and a half through what was then dense woods to its new abode on the hill. An account in the Minnesota
Forward
of June 16 included this description:

The rain of the night before had left the air cool and sweet, and the cheerful singing of choirs of birds mingled pleasantly with the strains of drum and bugle, as our long caravan wound up hill and down, o’ertowered by stands of oak through whose branches the sun shone as a blessing. One could not but feel the College had embarked on a venture of such magnificence that Nature herself rejoiced to see it. Soon a chorus of shouts was heard from the vanguard as it entered the clearing, and the lovely blue lake lay before us beyond the brow of the hill. The bell was gently lifted to the place of honor on the sturdy platform constructed for the day’s ceremonies. The first building will be raised on this spot…. Following the dedicatory ode of Dr. Watt, the college hymn was sung as the bell was softly tapped with a mallet.

In September, thirty-six students enrolled at Albion, arriving for fall term to find the main building completed except for the interior work—an imposing brick edifice nevertheless. The first floor was given over to a large chapel and a gallery for paintings and sculpture, the second to the college offices, a lecture hall, and two spacious classrooms. Unfortunately, a large sum of money that had been promised by an Eastern benefactor did not materialize, and so there was no dormitory or dining hall. Meals were taken in the gallery, which were simple meals pending the arrival of a cookstove, and the student body spent the first three weeks of the term constructing two log bunkhouses near the lake; meanwhile they slept in tents.

Mr. F. B. Reithman, professor of moral psychology, supervised the project, while writing to his brother in Philadelphia:

Our president is occupied with making great plans for us, and we are busy making a place to sleep before winter comes on. The morale of the students is very fine and would be even better were it not for daily chapel, which lasts upward of an hour. With little by way of tools, they are accomplishing heroic things worthy of Napoleon’s army. Finished a cabin of four rooms for Dr. and Mrs. Watt last week, and now we are engaged on a structure sixty by twenty feet, one of two that will be student quarters, God willing, if our hands don’t peel off. Send gloves, if you can, and some salve.

The faculty, consisting of Mr. Reithman, Mr. Waite, and Mr. Coutts, bedded down in the attic of Main, and by the middle of October, the most urgent construction completed (that of the two bunkhouses, named Emerson House and Carlyle House), they set about teaching. The course of studies comprised Classics, Theology, and Commercial: under Classics appeared Latin, Greek, Rhetoric, Poetry, and Oratory; under Theology were Moral Psychology, Old and New Testaments, Ecclesiastical History, and Science; and under Commercial, Arithmetic, Penmanship, Bookkeeping, and Hygienics. Mrs. Watt offered lessons in music, and manual training was available anywhere on the campus. The fee was $18 per term for tuition and board, plus twenty hours of labor per week—in the afternoons and on Saturdays, the students threw themselves upon the immense unfinished tasks of the college, including:

Felling four acres of timber and hauling the logs to town to be milled.

Clearing two acres of tree stumps so a garden could be planted in the spring. Planting fifty apple trees. Digging a well. Digging deep pits and building privies. Cutting and splitting fifty cords of firewood. Raising a flagpole. Raising a cross. Building a cookshed behind Main. Laying a wooden walk from the Watts’ cabin.

The work was interrupted by a tragedy October 11 when Frank Sutton was struck down and crushed by a tree. Apparently, he had cut it, then lost his footing on the slope as he attempted to run. He was
alone in the woods when this happened, and his body lay for several hours before it was discovered by the science class; meanwhile a wild beast had chewed off one arm and carried it away. The body was returned to Minar’s Grove for interment, and a memorial service held at the college the Sunday following.

Dr. Watt inspected the work daily. He devoted his chapel sermons to the topic of building, comparing the students to the children of Israel who were delivered out of captivity in Egypt and came into the promised land of Canaan, comparing the work to the building of the temple under Solomon, leaving the students to figure out who was Solomon in the analogy. In his journal, he complained of shortness of breath and dizziness, and noted, “I am too heavy,” but the rapid progress of the college excited him:

We are working a miracle here! Every day shows us some new success as our vision takes form—a wall rises, then four, doors and windows appear, a roof rises, a handsome building stands where once was only leaf and shadow—this amazes & inspires me to watch it! I walk around & am filled with new visions, dreams, ideas &c. of a great University that shall someday stand on this hill to rival any on the planet. I dare not speak these dreams to any person—any
sensible
man would laugh uproariously at such a notion! but then no “sensible” man could have accomplished here what we have done. This College is the one great work of my life. May God grant me a humble spirit to give all thanks to Him for bringing me to this place.

He decided to hold another grand occasion to celebrate the great work that had been brought so far, and once the thought struck him, he went into a fever and spent two days shut in his office writing an address. He called it Founders Day, October 30, and invited everyone he could think of, of whom some two hundred attended, including Mr. Bayfield, who was in the area foreclosing. The
Forward
wrote:

Approaching New Albion College from the east, the writer gained the crest of a hill crowned with blazing oak and gaudy maple and, upon glimpsing the distant campus through the trees, stopped the team so as to impress the agreeable vista on
his memory, for against Nature’s dying ostentation, New Albion unfolds a seemly tableau of such simple unaffected grandeur as to appear imagined, an apparition of Academe in the desolate forest, with its trim and handsome cottages, the well-laid walks and promenades, the orderly plantings of ornamental trees, and, bestriding all, the majestic spire of Main itself like an upraised finger calling all to stand in hushed wonder at what Providence had wrought…. Notable citizens from as far distant as St. Paul were in attendance to gaze upon the marvel for themselves, and those who admire the art of oratory found it in abundant supply.

Two-thirty
P.M.
, October 30, was perhaps the high-water mark of Henry’s life, for which the previous thirty-eight years had been rehearsal, when Mr. Bayfield spoke a few words of introduction to the crowd and Henry arose in his voluminous black gown, took his place before the fresh oak lectern on the porch of Main, placed his right hand in the gown between the third and fourth buttons and stretched out his left in the hortatory position, glanced down at his two-pound address, and lobbed the first sentence out toward the woods. Underfoot he felt solid white pine planks, behind him was solid brick rising to a spire from which a bell would toll when he sat down, and before him lay a yard something like he had known at Harvard, with grass and little trees trimmed to make perfect globes. And his audience, too, of course: two rows of solemn faculty, trustees, and dignitaries, including Governor Alexander Ramsey, Honorable Thaddeus Browne, the steamboat titan, Honorable Charles F. Peabody and Honorable Horatio Parker of the New Albion Land Company, Honorable Aldrich Bryant, Honorable Emerson Fremont, Honorable James Knox, Bishop Upton of the Methodist Church, and behind them, students and New Albion citizens in solid ranks, leaning forward to catch his voice. For several nights running Henry had had bad dreams, dutifully recorded in his journal (“Night sweats … lost in woods, running, terrible darkness & sounds of crashing & tearing … figures rising up from behind rocks & my own voice weeping & pleading … awoke exhausted & lay awake until dawn”), which he attributed to nervousness, but he was himself now as he warmed up to his address—a true physical feat, speaking outdoors, it demanded a stout man to sustain
the force and trajectory to carry the vowels in full cry to the farthest listener, and he was not helped by a breeze off the water, but Mr. Reithman, writing home, reported, “I crept away into the woods after an hour and his voice followed me there. I walked over the first hill and stood in a rocky ravine and put my arm around a tree and still Dr. Watt was there; the very rocks seemed to ring, and even the tree trembled to our president’s peroration.”

The address itself was lost in the turmoil of the following winter, and we have only a half-page of notes taken by a student, R. Williams, who perhaps thought he would be examined on the subject:

Elizabeth Peabody

Elizabeth Peabody

Elizabeth Peabody

Elizabeth Peabody

Henry spoke for two hours, and at the end, the people “rose to their feet with one accord and pressed forward to grasp him,” except Mr. Reithman, who “fell asleep in a pile of leaves and I did not awake until dark when I lay and admired the vast canopy of stars, a million million, and wondered at what mysterious fate had brought me to New Albion.” He then saw flames from the college and ran to investigate. It was the flames of four bonfires burning on the shore, one for each class, the students racing to fetch wood to make their fire burn the brightest.

Bitter weather set in on November 14, a heavy wet snow in the morning, driven by a stiff wind that grew stronger all day until Main could not be seen from the Watts’ cabin or from the bunkhouses by the lake. The blizzard did not abate all night, and by morning the bunkhouses, both Emerson and Carlyle, were buried, sheets of snow sweeping across the lake to make six-foot drifts, and so were some students, the snow having blown through the cracks and drifted onto the blankets. Emerson suffered two broken windows and was half full of snow and so cold that the residents emigrated to Carlyle during a lull in the storm and spent the next night there, two and three boys to a bed.

They had no food the first day and didn’t dare venture up the hill in that blinding white, so dazzling that four feet from the door they saw nothing. “We’re going to die,” said one boy. The others told him that help would arrive soon, and then they decided to play dead when help did come. They posted a lookout and practiced being dead, lying in grotesque poses as they imagined death might seize them, sprawled on backs across beds with heads hanging and mouths open, sprawled on the floor and one arm reaching toward the door, curled in a ball, crumpled and broken, as if death had flung them against the wall, seated and slumped forward and a hand grasping a pencil and a few lines of farewell letter ending with a long descending stroke as the writer perished. They practiced so they could do a good death scene in three seconds after the lookout’s “Go!” and imagined Mr. Reithman’s reaction when he shoved the door open and looked upon this carnage of the storm. The tragedy! The poor boys, innocent boys, the fragile flame of life snuffed out suddenly and so much candle left!
Then, of course, they would all jump up and yell at him, but some boys let their imaginations skip over that and go on to the next part: the long trip home in a box, the weeping family, the funeral where so many would shed bitter tears of remorse for not having done better by him, that cold still form of their former brother and friend.