In 1855, Oren B. Cheney, a dedicated abolitionist and Freewill Baptist minister, founded the Maine State Seminary. When the Maine state government granted Cheney a charter for his educational institution, they put in place a stipulation that he could only access state-awarded funds if the Seminary was able to raise $15,000 in private donations (“March 16, 1855: Maine State Seminary Wins its Charter”). Cheney’s dire search for money and land for his Seminary led him to Lewiston, a city home to a bustling manufacturing industry, including the textile mills of Benjamin Bates.
Benjamin Bates was a cotton magnate. In the 1850s, he established the Bates Manufacturing Company, building a massive cotton mill utilizing the water power generated by the waterfall in the Androscoggin River that is located in what we now call the cities of Lewiston and Auburn (Soler). Before colonization, this land, the river, and the falls were home to the peoples of the Wabanaki Confederacy, upon whose unceded land Bates College is built.
courtesy of the Boston Public Library.
The Bates Manufacturing Company started to become prosperous in the antebellum era, but grew even more during the Civil War. Before the war began, Benjamin Bates bought massive quantities of cotton, produced by the unpaid labor of enslaved workers in the southern United States (Soler). As cotton prices soared during the Civil War, the Bates Mill made massive profit from the stockpile of cotton bought at pre-war prices (Leamon). Benjamin Bates accrued massive wealth during the 1860s, using raw materials created by enslaved workers and exploiting the labor of underpaid mill workers.
Benjamin Bates’ wealth was inseparably tied to the practice of slavery, but Oren Cheney was desperate for funds. Thus began the connection between Cheney’s abolitionist institution and the cotton magnate Benjamin Bates. Bates gave approximately $200,000 to the Maine State Seminary over the course of his lifetime (Soler), and, in 1864, the college was renamed to Bates College in his honor (“Oren B. Cheney”).
However, Benjamin Bates was hardly the only donor to the newly-founded Maine State Seminary. This project explores the institution’s 1855-1857 donation ledgers, which record over $25,000 in total donations from individuals other than Benjamin Bates.
