Benjamin Hale was born on November 23, 1797, at Newburyport, Massachusetts, United States; the eldest of the ten children of Thomas and Alice (Little) Hale and a descendant in the eighth generation of Thomas Hale of Hertfordshire, England, who settled in Newburyport about 1637.
Graduating from Bowdoin in the class of 1818, Benjamin Hale taught a year at Saco Academy. He then entered Andover Theological Seminary only to have his course interrupted by a call to Bowdoin as tutor in 1820.
In 1823 Benjamin Hale was called to the principalship of the Gardiner Lyceum which opened that year with twenty students. At Gardiner the young principal built up an institution modeled closely upon the manual-labor school at Hofwyl, Switzerland, of Phillip E. von Fellenberg, a follower of Pestalozzi. To help meet the need for textbooks for the practical subjects which the school taught, he published in 1827 an Introduction to the Mechanical Principles of Carpentry, but by this time the school had passed its zenith and was soon to disappear for lack of student patronage and financial support. Hale therefore accepted in the same year (1827) the professorship of chemistry at Dartmouth.
He interested himself also in geology and mineralogy and took the lead in building up what was then an important collection of minerals. The following year he took orders in the Episcopal Church, preached frequently thereafter, and in 1835 published Scriptural Illustrations of the Daily Morning and Evening Service, and Litany of the Protestant Episcopal Church. The existence of episcopacy at Darmouth had irritated the Congregational clergy of the state who controlled the institution. Growing resentment gradually came to a head and at the commencement meeting of the board of trustees in August 1835 the professorship of chemistry was abolished secretly and without warning.
Hale was not notified of his change of status until after President Nathan Lord and the trustees had left Hanover. Unable otherwise to defend himself, he promptly published a long and remarkable letter concerning the affair, answered by a pamphlet, full of innuendo and erroneous statements, the author and printer of which were not disclosed. Public sympathy both among students and in the community ran strongly in Hale’s favor.
On December 21, 1836, Hale was inaugurated third president of Geneva (later Hobart) College, a small Episcopalian institution at Geneva, New York. But he was also an educational liberal, and that fact undoubtedly played an important part in his selection for his new post. Geneva College was already experimenting with a so-called “English course, ” by which students could obtain a degree by substituting modern languages for the classics, and Hale was in full sympathy with the movement. When failing health compelled him to resign in 1858, the trustees of the institution called attention to “his success in elevating it to its present prosperity, ” commenting at the same time on “the talent, suavity, zeal, and usefulness that have characterized his presidency. ” Upon his resignation he returned to Newburyport, where he resided until his death.
Benjamin Hale is famous as founder of the first institution at Gardiner, where courses in navigation, surveying, chemistry, civil architecture, carpentry, and agriculture were organized. He also established short winter courses in different branches of husbandry, a precedent which was followed by the great majority of agricultural colleges, and experimented with student government.
Hale was at first a member of Congregational Church, and later he became Episcopalian.
Quotations: “I trust I shall not be suspected of any purposes which may be regarded as sectarian; I value my own religious liberty too highly to design any infringement on that of others. ”
Benjamin Hale married, April 9, 1823, Mary Caroline King, and was the father of two children.
