Background

Homer was born on October 19, 1829 at South Sutton, Massachussets, United States, the second child of Jonathan and Mary Ann (Whipple) Sprague, both of old Colonial stock. On his father's side he was descended from William Sprague, who emigrated from England with his brothers Ralph and Richard in 1628, and was one of the founders of Charlestown and later of Hingham, Massachussets.

Education

He entered Yale in September 1848 and graduated in 1852. After his graduation he taught Greek and Latin at Worcester, Massachussets, studied law, and in 1854 was admitted to the bar.

Career

Although he worked as a boy in a cotton mill (where he was paid $1. 50 for a sixty-six hour week), he became a cobbler's apprentice, and had only desultory schooling.

After teaching at the Worcester, Massachussets, he served as principal of the Worcester High School from 1856 to 1859, but then returned to New Haven to practise law. At the opening of the Civil War he raised a volunteer company and was elected captain; his war experiences he described in two books, History of the 13th Infantry Regiment of Connecticut Volunteers (1867), and Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons (1915). After the war he went back to educational work with renewed vigor.

During 1866 and 1867 he was principal of the Connecticut State Normal School at New Britain, Connecticut, and in 1868 a member of the Connecticut House of Representatives, where he was chairman of the joint standing committee on education. In the fall of 1868 he became professor of rhetoric and English literature on the first faculty at Cornell University under Pres. Andrew Dickson White.

Leaving Cornell in 1870, he became president of Adelphi Academy in Brooklyn, New York, where his developing talents as a lyceum speaker brought him wide acclaim. He returned to New England in 1876 as headmaster of the Girls' High School of Boston, continued to lecture widely, and became a director of the Boston Watch and Ward Society.

In 1879 he founded the Martha's Vineyard Summer Institute, the "first general summer school in the United States. " But his spirit was not entirely content with the life of a New England headmaster.

In 1885 he accepted the presidency of Mills College at Oakland, California, newly reorganized; two years later he assumed the same office at the University of North Dakota, which had recently been established at Grand Forks, Dakota Territory. When in 1889 North Dakota entered the Union, he prepared the article on education for the new constitution, at the unanimous request of the constituent assembly.

Retiring from active administrative work in 1891, he spent most of his later years in Newton, Massachussets. He gave occasional lectures at the University of Southern California, at Drew Theological Seminary, and at Cornell, and wrote a number of books. At the time of his death he left completed a second series of studies in Shakespeare. He wrote several autobiographical articles for the Tomahawk, published by Alpha Sigma Phi (February, May 1916), and one of reminiscences which appeared in the Quarterly Journal of the University of North Dakota (October 1916).

He died in 1918.

Achievements

• Homer Baxter Sprague founded the Martha's Vineyard Summer Institute, the "first general summer school in the United States. " He served as President of Mills College in California and was appointed President of the University of North Dakota. An early progressive voice in education, he also served as president of Adelphi Academy in New York as it first opened its doors to female students. While there, he institutionalized the first fire drills in the United States school system. Besides, he was president of Yale's Linonian Society, editor of the Yale Literary Magazine.

Works

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• book

  • Paradise Lost, Books I and Ii.

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons; A Personal Experience

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • Shakespeare's Comedy of a Midsummer Night's Dream;

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • 13th Infantry Regiment

    (This work has been selected by scholars as being cultural...)

  • History of the 13th Infantry Regiment of Connecticut Volunteers, during the Great Rebellion

    (This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)

  • The Book of Job; The Poetic Portion Versified

    (Trieste Publishing has a massive catalogue of classic boo...)

Politics

A moderate Republican in politics and hence a member of the dominant political faction, it was only his unswerving opposition to the Louisiana lottery scheme that kept him from being elected the first United States senator from North Dakota.

Views

In many respects he represented the best qualities in post Civil War America - its optimism, its moral earnestness, its devotion to education, and its intense belief in progress. His greatest joy was not in his personal achievement but in his friendships with those men and women all over the country who had been his "boys and girls" in their student days, and whom, with a kind of patriarchal dignity, to the day of his death he regarded as being in a peculiar sense his own.

Membership

He was a member of Yale's Linonian Society, and one of the original members of the Scroll and Key Society, a member of the Skull and Bones Society.

Connections

On December 28, 1854, he married Antoinette Elizabeth Pardee of New Haven, Connecticut, by whom he had four children.

Father:

Jonathan Sprague

Mother:

Mary Ann (Whipple) Sprague

Spouse:

Antoinette Elisabeth Pardee Sprague

References

• Inauguration Address of Homer Baxter Sprague, President of Mills College: Seminary Park, Alameda Co;, California; October 24th, 1885 (Classic Reprint)