Part 45 (2/2)
On the 13th of May, 1887, the Rev. James Marshall, D. D., was elected president of the College to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation of Dr. Phelps. Dr. Marshall was an alumnus of Yale University and had spent several years in New York City in city missionary work. He entered upon the duties of his office in September, 1887. He brought with him to these duties a mind matured and well rounded, a culture produced by wide reading and considerable foreign travel and residence, and an intelligent appreciation of college work. He had a strong sense of the value of discipline in college life. He was much a.s.sisted by his cultured wife, whose attractive personality won for her a valued place in the hearts of the students. Mrs. Marshall died in Cedar Rapids after a brief illness in November, 1892, leaving her husband sadly alone, for there were no children in the household. Dr. Marshall labored on bravely in his work until September, 1896, when, just at the opening of the college year, he was stricken down with pneumonia, and his death occurred after a few days amidst circ.u.mstances of peculiar solitude.
His funeral services were conducted at the First Presbyterian church of this city, September 13, 1896, and the address on that occasion was given by Dr. J. Milton Greene, then of Ft. Dodge, Iowa, now of Havana, Cuba, and a life long friend of the deceased. Dr. Marshall is the only one of the presidents of our college who has departed this life, and he died literally in the harness. In summing up his life and work we avail ourselves of the words which it was our privilege to report to the board at their meeting October 13, 1896:
”He was a man of power, the power that is born of the possession of a high ideal and consecrated purpose and unusual faculty to organize, and an unflagging zeal to execute and perform. He never spared himself. He forgot himself, but he never forgot the college. His works do follow him. These works which remain with us are the strong and united faculty which he organized, and which he inspired with his own high ideals, the n.o.ble standard of scholars.h.i.+p to which he elevated the curriculum, the beautiful campus, which is a wonder of improvement when we contrast it with what it was when his hands first touched it, and the example of industry and energy which his life has furnished. It seems pathetic that he should have pa.s.sed away without seeing the fulfillment of the hopes he so dearly cherished, and the plans be so wisely formulated. But it is a common thing in this world that one should sow and another reap.
One conceives the building of the house, but leaves it to another to build it. Yet no one ever thinks that the former lives in vain.”
The college pursued its work in the year 1896-7 without a president, and it is a happiness to note the fact that owing to the harmonious cooperation of a devoted faculty and a sympathetic body of students, the year pa.s.sed with much smoothness and prosperity.
On the 5th of August, 1897, the Rev. Samuel B. McCormick, D. D., was called to the presidency of the college from the pastoral charge of the Presbyterian church of Omaha, Neb. He entered upon the duties of his office with the opening of the college year 1897. He soon made it manifest that a man of great vigor was directing its affairs. He went at his work with a spirit almost fierce, and he kept at it with a persistency that compelled things to come his way. His energy was contagious, and his colleagues in the faculty and on the board of trustees felt it from the day he came among us until the day he left.
The pace he kept was not always pleasurable, but it was always fruitful. It was during the seven years of his administration that great growth of the college was experienced in the size of the faculty, the number of the student body and increase of college buildings. The financial campaign that was undertaken to secure the $25,000 promised by Mr. Ralph Vorhees, of New Jersey, on condition of our raising $125,000 additional, was successfully conducted when Dr. McCormick was president. It was he who brought to Coe College the Rev. H. H. Maynard as field secretary, and the two men worked together with congenial vehemence and brought things to pa.s.s. Among the things which were brought to pa.s.s was the present college gymnasium a very useful and attractive a.s.set.
In the summer of 1904 Doctor McCormick was invited back to his old home in western Pennsylvania to become the chancellor of the Western University of Pennsylvania, located at Pittsburg, and which is now called the University of Pittsburg. This invitation was attractive to him chiefly because it seemed evidently to offer him unusual opportunity of enlarged usefulness in the educational field to which he had devoted his life. Yet it plainly caused him a struggle to sever his connection with Coe College, and with Cedar Rapids as a city. For in the seven years of his life here, he had become strongly attached to his friends and to the community which were strongly attached to him.
He also left this portion of our country, the Mississippi Valley which was to his mind so full of hope and promise, with great reluctance. Yet it was clear to him that he ought to go, and we parted from him with much regret September 15, 1904.
Marshall Hall and the Athletic Field House were erected in the summer of 1900, the latter the gift of Mr. C. B. Soutter. The College Gymnasium was completed in 1904.
During the year following the departure of Doctor McCormick the duties of the presidency were discharged by Dr. Stephen W. Stookey. Dr.
Stookey was an alumnus of Coe of the cla.s.s of 1884, the first cla.s.s to be graduated after Coe became a college. He was always from the beginning greatly attached to the college, and after teaching a while in the schools of Manchester, Iowa, he returned to his alma mater in 1892 to become professor of the natural sciences. From that time onward he filled a place of very distinguished usefulness in the inst.i.tution, commanding the high respect of his fellow workers in the faculty, the student body, and the board of trustees, until 1908 when he left Coe to a.s.sume the office of the presidency of Bellevue College, Nebraska, a position which he still occupies very much to the benefit of that school of learning.
[Ill.u.s.tration: BAPTIST CHURCH, CENTRAL CITY]
[Ill.u.s.tration: OLD BARN BUILT IN THE '50s AT CENTRAL CITY Now Used as a Store and Post Office]
At this point of our story we note the fact that at the October meeting of the board of trustees in 1899, Mr. C. B. Soutter was made the president of the board. Mr. Soutter had been a resident of Cedar Rapids since 1881 when he came from New York city to fill the very responsible place in the business house of T. M. Sinclair & Company made vacant by the death of Mr. Sinclair. The duties of the management of the large packing house were very onerous and responsible, yet Mr. Soutter was able, besides fulfilling them, to give much of his valuable time to his duties as a trustee of the college, to which he was called in 1883. He had already, therefore, for many years, shown marked interest in college work and adaptation for it by taste and culture when in 1899 he was felt to be the logical successor to Dr. Avery in the presidency. He entered at once with zeal and intelligence upon his new and enlarged duties. He was unintermitting in his attention to them until he resigned his office in October, 1907, and, greatly to the regret of his brethren, withdrew from the board of trustees.
On the 23rd of December, 1904, Dr. William Wilberforce Smith was chosen president of the college to succeed Doctor McCormick. Doctor Smith was not a clergyman as his predecessors had been and as. .h.i.therto has been usual with American colleges in their selection of a president. He had studied at Princeton Theological Seminary, and had been graduated therefrom, but he had never been ordained to the ministry. He had followed the vocation of a teacher, and was called to the presidency of Coe from the Berkely School in New York city, a school of high grade for boys. He entered upon his duties as president of Coe College at the opening of the college year 1905, and remained with the college for three years. He is now occupying the very honorable position of head of the School of Commerce and Finance in the James Millikin University, Decatur, Illinois.
His administration was marked by three notable events, all of which indicate stages of great progress in the history of the college: First, the successful launching of the plans to put the college on the list of the accepted colleges of the Carnegie foundation for the advancement of teaching. This took place near the close of the year 1908. Second, the attainment of the Science Hall, given by Mr. Carnegie at the cost to him of $63,500 upon the condition that the college raise $45,000 for its maintenance. Third, the successful completion of a financial campaign whereby a conditional grant of $50,000 was obtained from the General Board of Education [John D. Rockefeller Foundation] on the condition that the college pay all its debts and raise in various funds the sum of $200,000 additional for endowment and buildings. This campaign increased the a.s.sets of the college by $293,000.
It was during this campaign that the services of the Rev. Dr. H. H.
Maynard, field secretary of the college, were so peculiarly strenuous and so uniquely valuable. Dr. Maynard merits most honorable mention for his bold conceptions and his heroic execution of them, wherein the word ”fail” was expunged from his dictionary. Dr. Maynard left Coe College in the summer of 1908 and has become the vice president and field secretary of the University of Omaha, Nebraska.
In the year 1908-9 which followed the resignation of Dr. Smith, the college was governed by a commission of four members of the faculty, who distributed among themselves the duties of administration. The result was a smooth and prosperous year, although at the end of it all parties concerned were looking very wishfully towards a filling of the vacant office of the presidency. At length, on the 7th of September, 1909, Rev. Dr. John Abner Marquis, pastor of the Presbyterian church at Beaver, Pa., was chosen to be the head of the college. After due deliberation he decided to accept the call, and on the 12th of October, 1909, he was presented to the students and friends of the college as the president-elect. He returned to Beaver to sever his relations with the church there, with the Presbytery and synod, and he came in December and entered upon his duties. On the 13th of June, 1910, in connection with the exercises of commencement week, Doctor Marquis was formally inaugurated president of Coe College. This was the first time in which formal exercises of this character were observed in connection with setting a president over the inst.i.tution, and the occasion was greeted accordingly with peculiar pleasure, and large use was made of it to perfect a relations.h.i.+p which it is believed augurs great things to the advantage of the college. Doctor Marquis has been so short a time in his office that it would be too soon to speak of what he has done, but it is not too soon to say that in the brief period in which he has been president of the college, he has already awakened the fondest hopes and most steadfast convictions that under his administration the inst.i.tution over which he presides is destined to move forward to a future which will far surpa.s.s any measure of size and value that it ever attained in the past.
On the same week in last June in the midst of the commencement season which witnessed the inauguration of Doctor Marquis, ground was broken on the college campus by Mr. Robert S. Sinclair for a chapel in memory of his father, Mr. Thomas M. Sinclair. This memorial chapel was prepared for almost thirty years ago very soon after Mr. Sinclair's death, but the execution of the purpose has been long delayed. But now at last we see our thoughts and wishes about to be realized in the erection of a building which shall from its beauty and the purposes which it is destined to fulfill be a worthy monument to keep in perpetual remembrance a man, who, in his life-time, did so much to make it possible for us to have a college at all.
We have now accomplished the purpose for which we set out. We have, to the best of our ability, traced the history of Coe College from its beginnings to the present time. We have followed the Inst.i.tution from its fountain head in the heart and home of the Rev. Williston Jones, when a handful of young men gathered in his parlor for such elementary instruction as could be given by the zealous pastor and his wife, down to the present day, when more than three-hundred students, young men and maidens, gather in the halls of buildings erected and equipped for college purposes, and one of these buildings at least prepared and provided along the most progressive modern lines, the equal of any in the land. Today the faculty of thirty-two persons conducts the teaching of a curriculum which embraces every department of learning that is recognized as belonging to a liberal education. And these teachers have been prepared for their work by special training and selection.
The endowment also has grown from the paltry sum of $1,500, furnished in 1853 by Daniel Coe, to the sum of $450,000, and the total amount of money invested in the plant known as Coe College must exceed $750,000, which is surely no mean aggregate.
In the course of our history, we have seen a feeble rivulet sink at least twice in the sands only to reappear with new volume and freshness further down the bed of the stream. And we see it now a river of such dimension that it cannot disappear again. We have seen the work of the heroic men who have n.o.bly spent upon the college in the days when it sorely needed their help. Such men were not wanting in the days of emergency but were sent from G.o.d. They could not have known as we now can plainly see what they were doing. They wrought in faith what it is now given us to possess in sight. They sowed in weakness what we now reap in power. Surely the lesson is plain and impressive; surely the teaching of this historical sketch is to the purport that we with our larger resources should enrich the inst.i.tution which they sustained and promoted in their poverty.
They could not see how much worth their while it was to give and labor for Cedar Rapids Collegiate Inst.i.tute, for Parsons Seminary, for Coe Collegiate Inst.i.tute, for the inst.i.tution was then but a tender, feeble shoot, whose future development was an uncertainty. We now can plainly see that it is well worth our while to give and labor for Coe College, for it is now one of the most potent and promising of all the colleges in this Mississippi valley. And every intelligent mind who has any powers of observation and has any experience of college work, knows full well that as colleges grow and prosper they need more financial help. It would be the extreme of selfishness and folly to take the view that Coe College is now strong enough and rich enough to advance on its present a.s.sets to meet its future.
Its needs are greater than ever. But it presents itself not as a beggar or a suppliant, but as a splendid opportunity for investment. It presents itself as the finest possible place to locate something to be spent in buildings, equipment, and endowment whereby in the course of the years, and we may even say the centuries to come, this money can go on yielding the richest conceivable dividends in the preparation for life and leaders.h.i.+p of those of our choicest young men and women who shall come hither from near and far to enjoy the privileges of a college education. And thus as we close, our history becomes really an appeal.
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