The man behind the naming of Bates College

by Charles Francis

Tradition has it that in 1863 Benjamin Bates did not know that the little college that had begun as a Baptist seminary and to which he had been giving money to through the Lewiston Water Power Company was undergoing a name change, that the Maine State Seminary was in the process of becoming Bates College.

What Benjamin Bates’ immediate thoughts were when he learned of the name change are a matter of conjecture. That he approved of the change is borne out by the fact that he continued to serve as the college’s first major benefactor.

Most who know anything of the early history of Bates College know that the college owes much to Benjamin Bates. Yet they know little if anything about Benjamin Bates and Oren Cheney, the founder and president of the seminary that Cheney named in Benjamin Bates’ honor.

That Benjamin Bates was wealthy goes without saying. In today’s dollars Bates’ donations to the college that bears his name would exceed the million mark. That Benjamin Bates was a canny businessman also goes without saying. You make a lot of money by correctly interpreting trends and needs in the business world.

Benjamin Bates made a lot of mon- ey during the War Between the States. Foreseeing the inevitability of war, Bates stockpiled southern cotton in Lewiston warehouses and then produced uniforms for the Union Army.

Cotton and Lewiston’s early prosperity go hand-in-hand. As early as 1820 cotton manufacturers or wouldbe cotton manufacturers saw that Lewiston Falls had the waterpower to turn the wheels of industry. Therefore, Lewiston became a cotton-mill center. The waterpower of the falls was augmented with the construction of a great canal — sixty-two feet wide and three quarters of a mile long. The first mill on the canal was Bates No. 1.

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The history of the Maine State Seminary or Bates College goes handin-glove with the history of the development of Lewiston’s cotton manufacturing. Both were innovative and farsighted. Bates was the first coeducational eastern college in the country. (The first woman was graduated in 1869. She went on to teach at Vassar.)

The Maine State Seminary was founded in 1855. In 1863 it became a degree-granting institution. Its founder and president for thirty-nine years was Oren Cheney, a Free Will Baptist. Somewhat ironically, Benjamin Bates, the school’s first major benefactor, was a staunch Congregationalist.

One of the things — perhaps the most important thing — that Cheney and Bates had in common was the fact that both were temperance men. Both supported the Maine Law, the first successful temperance legislation in the United States.

Benjamin Bates made fortunes in Massachusetts as well as Maine. Bates got his start in business in dry goods in Boston. He was co-founder of Davis, Bates & Turner. When that firm dissolved in 1847, Bates had the wherewithal to become a power broker in several corporate areas including Boston’s First National Bank of Commerce and several railroads. He also served on the board of the Lewiston Water Power Company. This latter involvement led to his moving to the Lewiston-Auburn area and eventually to the founding of the Bates cotton mills.

Given the fact that the Maine State Seminary and its founder Oren Cheney represented and espoused a different religious sectarianism than Benjamin Bates, one wonders why Bates would support the institution even though he approved of the formers’ views on temperance. Perhaps a portion of the answer is found in the early makeup of the school’s student body.

The bulk of the seminary’s student body came from Maine’s hinterland. The students came from farm families of rural Oxford, Androscoggin and Franklin counties. Benjamin Bates came from a similar background, having been born in the rural farming community of Mansfield, Massachusetts.

Benjamin Bates believed in personally involving himself in the community. This is seen in the fact that, even though he was a wheeler-dealer in the world of big time corporation, he taught Sunday school. In short, Bates probably saw his early contributions to the Maine State Seminary as supporting the larger community surrounding Lewiston. He came to Lewiston not simply to make money but to help its residents and the residents of surrounding communities better themselves.

Beyond the above-mentioned points, the Maine State Seminary was, in a sense, nonsectarian. Oren Cheney’s philosophy regarding admission was that the seminary’s doors were open to all regardless of “wealth, gender, race or religion.”

Benjamin Bates intended that his beneficence regarding the college that bore his name be even more than what it was. Bates’ will bequeathed $100,000 to Bates. The will was probated in Massachusetts. Bates’ heirs fought the terms of the will. The college lost in the Massachusetts’ courts. One wonders if the result would have been the same had Bates’ will been probated in Maine. As for Benjamin Bates himself, he clearly regarded Maine as home. He is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Auburn, not all that far from the college named in his honor.

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