“Can These Stones Testify?”

 

            A stone marker on the Chapel House road, just at the crest on the rise between Stillman and Frank, reads,

 

In this ravine was held Aug. 13 1843 a missionary meeting addressed by Eugenio Kincaid ’22 and Alfred Bennett an epochal event for this Institution and the Baptists of New York.  Marked by the class of 1900 Hamilton Theological Seminary

 

            For some time, perhaps since its placement, the stone was located just within the tree line directly behind what is now the loading dock of the Frank Dining Hall.  The Dining Hall is on the spot of a ravine, forming an amphitheater including the upper portion where the large boulder is located, at which a consequential religious meeting was held.  By moving the marker, first alongside the road leading down to Spear House and, with a reconfiguration of that area and problems of snow removal, now to its present location, the college has kept faith with the intention of the class of 1900.

            Alfred Bennett was a minister of considerable stature among New York Baptists and was well known for his oratory and personal piety.  Howard Williams notes that even such an outstanding and well-known minister as Bennett “never received over $400, often only $300, with some of it in produce” as his yearly salary.  (History of Colgate University, p. 34).  Bennett was also present in Hamilton during the “removalist controversy” (August, 1848) when an early series of debates were held on the question of removing the institution to Rochester, NY.

            Eugenio Kincaid was born in January, 1797, in Wethersfield, CT, and at 18 was baptized in DeKalb, NY.  He graduated from the Theological Seminary in Hamilton in 1822 (one of our first two) and on July 10, 1822, he was ordained at Westmoreland, NY, to the Gospel ministry.  He received the D.D. degree from Bucknell, which he helped to launch, in 1858, as a school for Baptists of Pennsylvania.  Kincaid was a missionary in Burma from 1830-1865, traveled in the U.S. to enhance the missionary cause from 1842-1850, to which our marker testifies, and retired to Girard, Kansas, where he lived from 1865 until his death on April 3, 1883.

            Kincaid was a courageous and dynamic personality.  He once tried, unsuccessfully, to blaze a trail from Burma (Myanmar) to Assam, in Northeast India.  He was noticed by the king of Burma and served as his envoy in 1857 to the United States government. 

            It would be interesting to know who might have been sitting around in this ravine listening to the words of commission uttered by Bennett and Kincaid.  It is likely that members of the classes of 1844-1846 were present: John Sydney Beecher, missionary to Burma (1846-1866); William Jones, who served in Haiti for six years before going to Palestine (1854-1861); Edward Lord, who served in China (1847-1866), later to receive a D.D. degree from this institution in 1869; Appleton H. Danforth, who served in Assam (1847-1858); E. N. Jencks, who served briefly in Thailand (1846-1848), before returning to the U.S. to hold pastorates in several states; Ira Stoddard, who served in Assam (1847-1873); Calvin C. Moore, who served in Burma (1848-1855); and Samuel J. Smith, who worked in Thailand as a self-supporting missionary, publisher, translator, interpreter (1868-1909), among others who became missionaries at home, pastors, teachers, business leaders, persons of influence through service, demonstrating an old strand still continuing in the memory of this hallowed place.

            A world wide web?  Kincaid stood on the docks of Madras (Chennai) to bid farewell to his son leaving for studies in the U.S., and this a century and a half before our splendid Madras Study Group was launched by Bill Skelton.  Kincaid worked long among the Karens, people along the border of Thailand, served impressively in our time by Colgate students and others with Tom and Liz Brackett.  And Kincaid helped to launch Bucknell, to which numerous students from Hamilton have gone and with us in the Patriot League.

 

Written by
Dr. John Ross Carter
Professor of Philosophy and Religion
Robert Ho Professor in Asian Studies
Director of Chapel House