Eleazer Wheelock

In 1754, Eleazar Wheelock founded a school to train Native American Christians to become missionaries among their own tribes. On this episode of 5 Minutes in Church History, Dr. Stephen Nichols talks about Wheelock’s involvement in the Great Awakening in colonial New England.

Welcome back to another episode of 5 Minutes in Church History. On this episode, we are visiting with Eleazar Wheelock. Wheelock was born in 1711 in Connecticut. He died in 1779 in Hanover, New Hampshire. He was a colonial minister, an educator, college founder, and president. For the final decade of his life from 1769 until 1779, Wheelock was the first president of Dartmouth College. Dartmouth, an Ivy League college, was the last of the nine colonial colleges. Wheelock secured a charter from King George II. The college was named for the second Earl of Dartmouth. As an aside, there was a connection between the second Earl of Dartmouth and John Newton, the hymn writer. It was Dartmouth who made the introductions for Newton to become an Anglican minister. Well, let's go back to the colonies and back to the life of Wheelock, and let's go back to his life before he founded Dartmouth and before 1769.

I mentioned he was born in 1711. He was born on a 300-acre farm in Windham, Connecticut. He went to Yale, where he distinguished himself as quite the scholar. He graduated in 1733 and was awarded the Berkeley scholar prize. It was named for the British philosopher and Anglican bishop George Berkeley, who had donated a large sum of money and books to Yale. Well, after Yale, Wheelock became the pastor of the second Congregational church in Lebanon, Connecticut. The first church served to the south, but the second church served the growing population to the north, and it was technically called the Lebanon North Parish. Well, the same year he became pastor of Second Church, he married Sarah Davenport. And then in 1740, revivals came not only to Lebanon where Wheelock was the pastor there, but also to the whole Connecticut River Valley and to the entire colonies. This was part of the Great Awakening. Wheelock became one of the Great Awakening's great advocates, and was also one of the itinerant ministers.

In June of 1741, Wheelock was at Northampton, Massachusetts, and that was where the church of Jonathan Edwards was. And for the next two weeks, he and a handful of others preached up and down the Connecticut River Valley, crisscrossing Massachusetts and Connecticut. On July 8th, 1741, Wheelock, Jonathan Edwards, and a handful of other pastors ended up in Enfield, Connecticut. And that evening, Edwards preached his famous “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” In a letter back to his church, Wheelock wrote, "It was very marvelous and a great assembly at Enfield." Well, that was 1741.

In 1743, a pivotal moment occurred in the life of Wheelock. He was visited by Samson Occom. Occom was a Native American, a Mohegan. He had converted as a teenager during the Great Awakening, and he desired to study, and so he came to Wheelock looking for a tutor. Samson Occom writes later in his autobiography that from 1743 until 1747, for four years he studied theology with Eleazar Wheelock. Samson Occom went on to become a Presbyterian minister, and that event inspired Wheelock.

In 1754, he founded Moor’s Charity School there in Lebanon, Connecticut. It had a singular focus: to educate Native Americans who desired to be missionaries among Native Americans. Occom went on a tour to Britain to raise money for the school, and it was very successful, and that encouraged Wheelock to expand his school and to add a college. He was unsuccessful to get a charter to start another college in Connecticut because they already had Yale. So off he went to the colony of New Hampshire and in 1769, he founded Dartmouth College. He intended to train both Native Americans and the colonists’ sons to be missionaries—missionaries to the Native Americans in colonial New England.

Well, that is the life and labors of Eleazar Wheelock, a colonial minister, educator, and college president. And I'm Steve Nichols and thanks for listening to 5 Minutes in Church History.