John Baldwin was an American educator, and the founder of Baldwin Institute (later Baldwin University) in Berea, Ohio, which would eventually merge into Baldwin–Wallace College, now Baldwin-Wallace University.
Background
He was born on October 13, 1799, at North Branford, Connecticut, the son of Joseph and Rosanna (Meloy) Baldwin and a descendant of the John Baldwin who came from Buckinghamshire in 1638 and settled in Milford. His father was a blacksmith who had been a captain in the Revolutionary War. His mother, the daughter of an Irish stowaway who had become a prosperous merchant in New Haven, is said to have been well educated for a woman of her day and to have wished to enter Yale. Her son, when a young man, brooding over the exclusion of his mother from that institution, resolved that if ever he attained the means to found a school it should be open to women on the same terms as to men.
Education
His parents were poor; he had from an early time to make his own way, and his education was largely self-acquired. His home training was sternly religious and even ascetic. At the age of eighteen he joined the Methodist Church. For a time he attended an academy, where he paid in part for his tuition by chopping wood, building fires and ringing the bell.
Career
He picked up enough learning to enable him to teach, his first school being at Fishkill, New York, and his next at some place in Maryland. His earnings of several years he invested in a tract of 200 acres of land which he had never seen, at Berea, Ohio. He was married on January 31, 1828, to Mary D. Chappel of New London. The young couple moved to Berea, ending their three weeks' journey to the then mid-western frontier about the first of May. Baldwin erected a grist-mill, a saw-mill, and a carding-mill, all run by water-power, and also the first frame dwelling in the township. A town soon grew up about his settlement.
In 1837, with three others, he organized the Lyceum Village and Berea Seminary, which was conducted for five years. About 1842, from a variety of causes, all his enterprises failed and he became bankrupt. Some time afterward he discovered on his land a fragment of sandstone which he used to sharpen a knife. He saw that it was excellent material for grindstones, and he later discovered that a plentiful supply of this rock underlay his land. The incident marked the beginning of the great Berea grindstone industry and the recouping and afterward the immense growth of Baldwin's fortune. He always attributed the discovery to divine response to a special prayer, repeated every day for a month, in which he vowed that if wealth came to him he would devote all but a moderate subsistence for himself and family to God's work.
The ideal of a school open to both sexes and to all races had long possessed him. His first venture toward its realization was made in 1845, when he donated for the purpose thirty acres of land and a brick building at Berea, to the North Ohio Conference of the Methodist Church. The school, known as Berea (sometimes Baldwin) Institute, was opened April 9, 1846. In 1857 it was reorganized as Baldwin University. Baldwin's anti-slavery convictions, which he had held from youth, took him to Kansas in the troublous days of 1858. He carried with him $10, 000 in gold. He seems, however, not to have mixed in the border warfare then being waged. Instead he determined upon founding another school. He selected a spot (now Baldwin) in Douglas County, where he erected a university building which he turned over to the local Methodist Conference and which was opened as a school (now Baker University) in September 1859. He returned from Kansas in the same year.
In 1867 he bought 1, 700 acres in St. Mary Parish, 105 miles west of New Orleans, and established the Baldwin Seminary (now the Baldwin Public School). As local feeling prevented his opening this to both whites and Negroes, he accordingly made it a school for whites, but bought more land and established another school to be devoted solely to Negroes. The adjoining land was brought to a high state of cultivation and has been for many years a sugar plantation. He and his wife made it their winter home until his death. In 1880 he founded a high school for boys and another for girls in Bangalore, India, and just before his death he donated an additional forty acres to Baldwin (now Baldwin-Wallace) College at Berea. He died at Baldwin.
Achievements
Religion
At the age of eighteen he joined the Methodist Church.
Politics
Though he was a strong supporter of the Union, no special activities are recorded of his Civil War days.
Personality
Baldwin was a man of many idiosyncrasies of mind and manner. In business matters he was unmethodical; he kept no books, but from time to time jotted down memoranda on scraps of paper. He was moody; he went about oddly garmented; "He appeared like a humble pilgrim from a far country, " writes his biographer, "with a great mission on his mind and heart in the accomplishment of which he must make haste and lose no time. "
Interests
Music & Bands
He saw that it was excellent material for grindstones, and he later discovered that a plentiful supply of this rock underlay his land.
Connections
He was married on January 31, 1828, to Mary Chappel of New London.