John Harvard (clergyman)

From Freepedia

John Harvard (November 26, 1607 – September 14, 1638) was a Massachusetts clergyman, after whom Harvard University is named.

He was born and raised in London, in the borough of Southwark, the fourth of nine children, the son of Robert Harvard (1562-1625), a butcher and tavern owner, and his wife, Katherine Rogers (1584-1635), a native of Stratford-on-Avon whose father, Thomas Rogers (1540-1611), is sometimes thought to have been an associate of William Shakespeare (1564-1616).

In 1625, his father, a stepsister, and two brothers died of the plague. Only his mother and one brother, Thomas, remained of his immediate family. She remarried to John Elletson (1580-1626) who died within months of their marriage, and then to Richard Yearwood (1580-1632) in 1627. Harvard entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, then a Puritan stronghold, in December 1627 and received his B. A. in 1632. Katherine died in 1635 and Thomas in the spring of 1637. John married Ann Sadler (1614-1655), of Ringmer, Sussex, in April, 1636, daughter of the Rev. John Sadler and sister of Harvard's contemporary, John Sadler, lawyer and orientalist.

In May 1637 he emigrated with his wife to New England and settled in Charlestown, Massachusetts where many of his classmates had arrived before him. Charlestown made him the teaching elder of the Church, but within the following year he contracted tuberculosis and died on September 14, 1638.

Childless, Harvard bequeathed £800 (half of his estate) and his library of around 400 volumes to the New College at nearby Cambridge, which had been founded on September 8, 1636, and to his friend, the first schoolmaster of this college, Nathaniel Eaton who, needless to say, was very much hated afterwards by the jealous townsfolk who saw to his deposition and even attempted to do the same to his successor, Henry Dunster, but were foiled by a much more aware ecclesiastical power of the Church at Cambridge. Eaton's Records indicate that the building of the new college began immediately in 1638 with the assistance of the carpenter Thomas Meakins and/or his son, Thomas Meakins, Jr. of Charlestown. It was completely constructed of wood with a stone foundation and cellar, had its own apple orchard, and was apparently equipped with live-in accommodations for some 30 students as there were at least that many attendant within the first year.

The school renamed itself "Harvard College" on March 13, 1639, and Harvard was first referred to as a university rather than a college by the new Massachusetts constitution of 1780.

No records or illustrations remain of the earliest college which burnt to the ground in 1674 along with all but one of Harvard's original 400 volume donation; but judging from student references to black persons as "Moors", its possible that Shakespeare's works comprised a large portion of the volumes.

Debate rages over whether or not the students actually had daily access to beer, or whether or not the word "beare" these people cite as "proof" of alcohol consumption actually refers to "berrie", the unfermented juice of grapes or apples: similar to what college students consume today in their free time. Vessels of the time, such as commemorative rummers, humpen or pewter tankards, indicate that beer was commonly spelled "bier" or "beir", and court records indicate that excessive alcohol consumption was punished by the temporary attachment of one's estate, or permanent attachment and banishment from the colony. Also, 17th Century phonics tend to indicate that anything with an "e" on the end of the word was pronounced "ē" as a separate syllable.

Samuel Eliot Morison, in his Builders of the Bay Colony (1930), tends to dispell this theory, though, citing numerous references to the consumption of beer by students doing their studies up "until recent times". As in John Winthrop, Winthrop's Journal "The History of New England" 1630–1649, however, Morison isn't known to be 100% correct on all accounts either.

External link

• http://www.harvard-magazine.com/issues/jf00/vita.html
• John Harvard as depicted on a cigar label from the early part of the 20th Century