John Finley Crowe
Excerpts from GLIMPSES OF HANOVER by Frank Baker
John
Finley Crowe - Before Hanover
Following a familiar pattern of migration, the family of John Finley Crowe came to America from England and Ireland, settled in Virginia, moved westward to Tennessee and Kentucky, then to Missouri. Thanks to requests from his children, Crowe took time out in 1849 to "favor them with some account of my early life."
John Finley Crowe was born in Green County, Tennessee, on June, 16, 1787. His father and mother and an older brother and sister moved from near Staunton, Virginia, to meadow Creek in 1783. Also living in this area were six brothers and three sisters of his mother.
Because of the war with the Cherokee Indians, a station was formed at Crowe's father's Tennessee farm called "Crowe's Station" for protection against the redskins. There were frequent raids, preventing the settlers from improving their farms. Furthermore, education and religious activities were neglected. A Presbyterian church was organized to which Crowe's parents belonged, but it didn't last long for the neighborhood soon became famous for frolic and dissipation. Crowe admitted that at this time, his only desire was "to excel in vain and sinful amusements."
In 1802 the family moved to a beautiful valley in southeastern Missouri which was named Bellevue. As in Tennessee, little attention was given to religion there. For six years Crowe never heard a sermon. But in 1808 three Presbyterian elders moved to Bellevue from North Carolina. One of them, Robert Stevenson, became Crowe's spiritual advisor. After much effort he persuaded the young man to prepare for the gospel ministry.
To begin his education, Crowe was sent 400 miles eastward to Danville, Kentucky, to live with his uncle, William Crowe, and attend school. Uncle William was not a religious man so Crowe soon found himself enjoying the excitement of the ballroom. And his schooling came temporarily to a halt when his master, a Dr. Samuel Demaree, became ill. But he was taken under the wing of a Rev. Samuel Finley for further training. Next came college at Transylvania which he entered at the beginning of the 1811-1812 winter quarter. He found that he was at the bottom of his class even though he was 24 years of age. Learning to study properly soon put Crowe at the top.
After two years in college two of his professors (one was Dr. James Blythe, later to become Hanover College's first President), suggested that he enter the newly established seminary at Princeton, New Jersey. They tried to persuade him not to marry until his seminary training was completed. But Cupid won out so he returned to Missouri and on November 23, 1813, John Crowe and Esther Alexander were married. Their honeymoon was a horseback journey back to Kentucky. Both loved music and daily amused themselves while traveling "through the wilderness of Illinois by singing some of the songs of Zion."
His enrollment was postponed a year. It followed his attendance at the Presbyterian General Assembly in Philadelphia in May, 1814. But Princeton was a disappointment. The village was shabby and there were only two teachers and 33 students in the seminary.
Crowe returned to Kentucky in May, 1815, to find his wife in good health and anxious to show him their first child. He first taught school at Bryant's Station and then at Shelbyville Academy to replace a Rev. Andrew Fulton, who had accepted a call to the Carmel Associated Reformed Presbyterian Church about a mile southwest of Dunn's Settlement in Jefferson County, Indiana.
Crowe was invited to preach in the three Presbyterian churches in the area near Shelbyville. His school prospered and he preached weekly, soon deciding that he would like to give all of his time to the ministry.
His first full time pastorate was at Fox Run and nearby Bullskin. It was during this time that Crowe's longstanding concern for the negro became evident. In his diary he wrote that he was willing "to suffer persecution and reproach, the loss of friends and property if he might only be instrumental in doing something for the amelioration of the poor slave." He decided to open a Sunday School for colored people. But he could find no building in Shelbyville that would permit him to house the school.
So he turned in another direction - the printed word. On May 7, 1822, the first issue of the Abolition Intelligence and Missionary Magazine, edited and published by J.F. Crowe, appeared. The magazine was published for a year with Crowe being threatened with loss of friends and property. But since a press was no longer available to him and subscriptions were dwindling, he finally gave up the publication and welcomed a call to become pastor of the Hanover Presbyterian Church in Indiana in 1823.
John
Finley Crowe - At Hanover
When John Finley Crowe arrived in this area the town was called "South Hanover" since there was another "Hanover" in Shelby County. As you know, it had previously been named "Dunn's Settlement." Why "Hanover?"
The first pastor of the Hanover Presbyterian Church was Thomas Coleman Searle. He was pastor of the Madison church when the Hanover group formed its own church in 1820. He continued to serve both churches until 1821 when he died from a fever. His wife was greatly beloved by the community and in honor of the town from which she came - Hanover, N.H. - the church, town, and college took their names.
Searle was graduated as valedictorian from Dartmouth College and then attended Princeton Seminary (where he may well have known Crowe), graduating in 1815. He was called back to Dartmouth to be professor of logic soon after his marriage to Annette Woodward. A brilliant scholar, he gave up the professorial life to become and Indiana pastor. John dickey said of him that he "was a man of superior talents, of polished manners, and of a most affectionate disposition... he was a very zealous, popular, and successful minister." At the time of his death he was on a committee which framed the first law for the common school system in Indiana.
The year after Crowe came to his new charge, he began building what is now called the Crowe-Garritt house, located to the north of the Hanover Presbyterian Church. The house first consisted of two great rooms, a parlor, and a sitting room. They faced each other across a hallway. At the end of each room was a huge stone fireplace. A long roof covered the cabin forming a large attic that could be reached by a ladder.
Additions were periodically built on the house, most during Crowe's lifetime. The west wing was probably added first, followed by the east wing and the second story rooms. A basement room on the west site (13 X 11 ft.) Was said to have been the room where Crowe banished one of his sons (and his wife) because the young man had either married early or had not sought his father's consent.
Meanwhile Crowe began almost at once to agitate among Indiana Presbyterians for a school to train ministers. Since he spent a quarter of his time in missionary work, he was constantly reminded of the shortage of preachers.
Finally he succeeded in convincing Salem presbytery in 1824 to appoint a committee "to devise ways and means for the education of poor and pious youth for the ministry." Madison Presbytery, formed in 1826, continued this concern. But the prospects for a school were not good and Crowe was becoming discouraged. Pastoral work had reached a new low, so Crowe was attracted by a call to become pastor of a Dayton, Ohio, church.
He probably would have gone to Dayton, save for a tragic incident which awakened the people of Hanover. Mrs. Crowe was doing some dyeing out of doors. The Crowe's youngest daughter fell into the boiling water and was so badly burned that she died a few days later. The congregation of the Hanover church awoke from its lethargy. Crowe agreed to stay in Hanover and stop looking for an academy teacher. Instead he agreed to be that man himself. As you well know, his school opened on January 1, 1827. Tradition has it that one of the earliest students chalked "Hanover College" on the loom-house door.
Excerpts from HISTORY OF HANOVER COLLEGE 1827 - 1927
by --- Mills
If, as Mr. Emerson once said, an institution is but the lengthened shadow of a man, Hanover College is the extension and embodiment of the spirit and purpose of John Finley Crowe. Many other equally devoted and able men have made vital contributions, but to none of these is the debt so great as to the rugged pioneer preacher and teacher who was "twice the founder." A proper appreciation of his personality and character is essential to the understanding of this first church college of Indiana. No picture of the man drawn at the close of the century can so fully depict his zeal for religion, his energy and devotion, and the modest, prophetic beginnings of the College, as the "succinct History of Hanover College," published in the first catalogue issued by the institution January, 1833, and evidently prepared by Dr. Crowe.
Dr. Crowe was born in Green County, Tennessee, then a part of North Carolina, June 16, 1787. With his parents he moved to Bellevue, Missouri, in 1802, a lad of fifteen. He taught the neighborhood school for several years and was brought to recognize a call to the gospel ministry under the powerful preaching of a Mr. Ward of the Methodist Church. In 1809 he came back to Kentucky to enter upon the necessary studies for his chosen calling. After two years of private study he entered Transylvania University at Lexington, from which he was duly graduated in 1813, at the age of twenty six. During his student days, Mr. Crowe devoted a part of his time and energy to the rather irregular publication of an abolitionist paper, which did not contribute to his popularity in the Blue Grass country. He also became a member and an elder in the church of Rev. James Blythe whom he later induced to become the first president of Hanover College. In 1814 Dr. Crowe was sent as a commissioner to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian church, meeting at Philadelphia, a no mean recognition of the ability of the young layman. The year 1814 to 1815 he studied in the Princeton Theological Seminary, was ordained to the ministry of the Presbyterian Church in 1815, and took charge of the Academy at Shelbyville, Kentucky, the same year. Later he became pastor of two rural churches near Shelbyville, but his anti-slavery views and advocacy of temperance made him so unpopular at Shelbyville that he gladly accepted the call of the Hanover church in 1823.
At once upon settling at Hanover Dr. Crowe began to agitate the establishment of a system of schools to supply ministers for the rapidly growing population of the states north of the Ohio River and to the West, and to serve the cultural needs of the new country. In the April meeting of the Presbytery in 1824 he moved for the appointment of a committee to investigate the possibility of establishing a school, the committee to report the following spring.
W. W. Cheever, class of 1838 writes: "My father who was teaching school in Paris, Jennings County, Indiana was prevailed upon by Rev. John Finley Crowe to remove in 1825 to Hanover and open a school in the old stone meeting house, which was to become in part a sort of feeder to the classical academy which Mr. Crowe intended to open at no distant date." About the same time Dr. Crowe was a member of a committee appointed by Presbytery, probably at his suggestion to induce the General Assembly to locate the Western Theological Seminary in Indiana. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, however, was chosen as the location.
In the fall of 1825 Presbytery definitely decided to establish the proposed academy at Hanover, and Dr. Crowe devoted a year to the effort to procure a "teacher." The fall of 1826 Presbytery asked him to take the post himself, which he promptly did, and held his first classes January 1, 1827. The new school operated thus at first as a private venture, being recognized as "Hanover Academy and elected Mr. Crowe as principal, which office he held until the Academy was superseded by Hanover College.
By resolution adopted by the trustees September 24, 1832, Dr. Crowe became Vice president of the new institution, with his former Pastor as President. The vice-presidency of the college he held with the exception of a brief interruption at the time of the removal to Madison, until his retirement in 1857.
During the thirty years of his active connection with the institution he was for a time its only instructor, and after its elevation to college rank. The Professor of Logic, History, Belles Lettres, and political Economy. During all of this period he was also a member of the Board of Trustees much of the time its president, and for many years its secretary.
Added to these numerous burdens, Dr. Crowe in critical periods serves as financial agent, subjecting himself to exposure undue fatigue and humiliation in soliciting funds to keep the college going. His own story of his experiences in a trip "beyond the mountains" during the winter of 1830-31 reveals not only his stubborn devotion to the college, but the nature of the struggle which all pioneer colleges were compelled to make. It gives a very good picture of the inevitable lot of the solicitor of endowments.