Table of Contents
Momentum from the Beginning
The University in 1856
The people of the area, having provided the means to send the college tottering on its way, quickly became its principal fund-raisers. As promptly as late 1856 they exhorted the state legislature to appropriate $50,000 for the University, which one resolution drawn up at a meeting of local citizenry proclaimed was “unsurpassed by any institution of similar grade” (how they knew this of a less-than-one-year-old seminary whose lone building stood in a wind-buffeted hayfield in northernmost New York is unrecorded, but the national climate of the times was one of unabashed boosterism not inclined to be thwarted by fact-checking). In April 1857 the legislature offered $25,000 if the trustees would raise an equal amount. “This first matching grant challenge in St. Lawrence's history was successful, and the resulting $50,000 became the nest egg of the College of Letters and Science,” according to The Scarlet and the Brown , St. Lawrence's 125th-anniversary history book.
During the Civil War, St. Lawrence lived a hand-to-mouth existence. The war years saw the first endowed chair drives, amounting to $20,000 to $25,000 (in era when the president, who was also half the faculty, was paid $1,100 a year). These were successful despite the uncertainties brought on by the war. Even so, at one point the trustees voted to suspend the College of Letters and Science, but, after consuming a dinner set before them by faculty and community wives, rescinded the decision. What they were served, or what was in it, remains a mystery.
While the Theological School gained strength, the recession year 1885-86 marked yet another nearly fatal crisis for the College of Letters and Science. At a June meeting in the Canton Town Hall , where cessation of operations was seriously and gloomily debated, it was the students who came to the rescue. Singing the newly composed “The Scarlet and the Brown” (“Wave the folds of the scarlet and the brown / That we ne'er will see hauled down; /And though we students may be scattered far and wide, / Still we'll rally to the scarlet and the brown…”), they did indeed rally, pledging $1,100. Townsfolk once again took up the cause, according to Sixty Years of St. Lawrence, the University's first full-fledged history book, published in 1916. They dug deep enough to double the students' amount, and within six months the long-range goal of $50,000 was surpassed thanks to some footwork by the faculty and some successful challenges.
The Scarlet and the Brown identifies this as St. Lawrence's first real campaign. Among early donors were P.T. Barnum (who also put the College of Letters and Science in his will, even though he didn't much care for higher education) and New York State Gov. Roswell P. Flower of Watertown . All this was cause for another first, a campaign celebration, on Dec. 1, 1886.