Whispering Pines

Very Respectable in Its Infancy

Accounts of Bowdoin’s first Commencement revealed resilience and tenacity.

BOWDOIN’S FIRST COMMENCEMENT, in 1806, has been recounted in histories of the College but bears repeating here, as Bowdoin celebrates its second year of graduation ceremonies under circumstances imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Class of 1806 consisted of seven undergraduates (an eighth had died at sea during his first year); all were from Massachusetts, although four were from the District of Maine (before Maine’s statehood in 1820). Twice as many honorary degrees were granted ad eundem at Commencement than undergraduate degrees, following a nineteenth-century practice that allowed graduates of other institutions to receive an honorary degree at a Bowdoin Commencement if they paid a five-dollar fee. Eleven Harvard graduates (three of whom had also picked up honorary degrees from Yale) and individual graduates from Brown, Yale, and Dartmouth became ad eundem alumni of Bowdoin in 1806.

Harvard alumnus Leverett Saltonstall came by stagecoach from Salem, Massachusetts, to accept an honorary degree from the fledgling college. His eyewitness account and a summary by Alpheus Spring Packard of the Class of 1816, drawn from the experiences of attendees (including his father, an overseer of the College), form the basis for this retelling.

Packard describes travel from Boston to Brunswick in 1806—an Eastern coaster taking on passengers and freight in Boston would take a week to arrive; the biweekly mail coach made stops at every village along the way and could take four days. After the stagecoach crossed the Piscataqua River at the New Hampshire border on a scow, passengers faced the “rugged, toilsome miles of Cape Neddick and Wells,” the “dense gloom of the Saco woods,” the bustling activity of Portland, and views of Casco Bay, before coming finally to “a single three-story edifice of brick, a plain unpainted chapel of wood, a church and spire yet unfinished, [and] a president’s house of most modest pretension.” He doesn’t mention that the main stagecoach stop was at Ebenezer Nichols’s tavern, located a stone’s throw from Massachusetts Hall at the northwest corner of the college grounds.

In Packard’s words, “The novelty of the occasion … attracted a large company of visitors; wealth, position, fashion, and beauty honored the infant college on its first gala day.” Saltonstall arrived several days before the scheduled ceremonies on September 3. It began to rain on the afternoon of the second, and Saltonstall was grateful that George Thorndike of the graduating class had arranged “part of a bed” for him to sleep in. Guests arriving in the evening encountered “gullied and muddy roads.” General Henry Knox’s carriage, “with its company of gentlemen and ladies, was upset down the bank on the side of the bridge,” although no one, including George Washington’s chief of artillery, was injured.

It blew a gale on the third, tearing up trees and flattening fields of corn. Commencement exercises were postponed until the fourth. As more guests streamed in on the morning of the third, residents of Brunswick and Topsham scrambled to accommodate overnight guests. “Many people slept in hay mows & many others had no other than a blanket & ye floor,” according to Saltonstall.

The second meetinghouse of First Parish Church was an unfinished shell at the time but still served as the site of the Commencement exercises. President Joseph McKeen was forced to give his address under the cover of an umbrella. Packard noted wryly that the experiences of the audience were not recorded. McKeen concluded his address with these words: “As instruction here commenced with you, on you, more than on any succeeding class, will depend the reputation of this infant seminary.”

Safely back in Salem, Saltonstall summed up the experience: “Several of ye graduates were sons of men of property & large and reputable connexions . . . had it been fair weather we should all have been much pleased . . . to have made Brunswick Commencement a place of fashionable resort—a little rain destroys ye whole gilding . . . This College is very respectable in its infancy & I hope it will grow in advantage & become a very important seminary.” The hopes expressed by McKeen and Saltonstall are renewed and reinforced with each graduating class.

John R. Cross ’76 is secretary of development and college relations.