When thinking about the financial history of Bates College, there is one name that immediately comes to mind: Benjamin Bates. In recent years, Benjamin Bates’s life and legacy has become a point of interest as we, like other colleges, grapple with our early history. Benjamin Bates was a cotton magnate, whose business depended on purchasing cheap row cotton, produced by enslaved workers in the American South, and transforming it into fabric through the work of underpaid mill operatives in Maine (read the Context section for more).

But, Benjamin Bates was hardly the only person who provided financial support in the early days of the College. This project aims to think more about the many smaller donations recorded in the ledger of the Maine State Seminary. In particular, we will think about where the money that supported the newly-formed Seminary came from. Were there certain geographic areas that contributed more? Is there meaningful difference between donations from Maine, and those from outside of Maine? What about differences between counties?

GitHub

Download the data and complete R scripts from GitHub.