Colby College
Maine
On Mayflower Hill above the Kennebec River city of Waterville sits Colby College, one of New England's great small liberal arts colleges, and the institution that produced one of the most consequential martyrs in American history.
Colby traces its roots to February twenty-seventh, eighteen thirteen, when the Commonwealth of Massachusetts chartered the Maine Literary and Theological Institution, making it the thirty-third college founded in the United States. It was established by Baptist missionaries who had come to the Maine frontier to do religious work and who wanted a place to train their own ministers. The institution began in Waterville and went through several names before settling, in eighteen ninety-nine, on Colby College, in honor of Gardner Colby, a Christian philanthropist whose donations sustained it through lean decades.
One of the college's most significant early alumni graduated in eighteen twenty-six. His name was Elijah Parish Lovejoy, and he left Waterville as class valedictorian. He became a newspaper editor and Presbyterian minister in St. Louis, Missouri, and then in Alton, Illinois, where his antislavery editorials enraged pro-slavery mobs. Three times, mobs broke into his print shop and destroyed his press. On November seventh, eighteen thirty-seven, defending his fourth press, Lovejoy was shot and killed. He became the first American martyr to freedom of the press. The murder of a white editor defending antislavery speech shocked the North in ways that the suffering of enslaved people had not, galvanizing the abolitionist movement. Abraham Lincoln later credited the Lovejoy case as a formative influence on his thinking.
Colby also holds a notable progressive distinction: in eighteen seventy-one it became the first all-male New England college to admit women as students, decades before most of its peers.
Today Colby's seven-hundred-fourteen-acre campus is regarded as one of the most beautiful in the country, and the college has invested heavily in both its art museum and in revitalizing downtown Waterville itself.
