Opportunity.
When the Pilgrims left England and the Netherlands to start a new home in the New World one of their chief goals was opportunity. And that included a chance to get an education.

As time flies, it wasn’t too many years before schools were opened in the English colonies. They weren’t much but they were better than nothing. There were no trained teachers so farmers, blacksmiths, shoemakers and young women seeking employment became teachers.

One of these was Grandison Fairchild, a descendant of John Howland of the Mayflower. He was primarily a farmer in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, a blacksmith, shoemaker and whatever was needed.

Among his students was Mark Hopkins and probably some Indians too for Stockbridge was the center of the movement to educate and Christianize the Indians.

Then in 1818 Grandison Fairchild decided to move to the Western Reserve in northern Ohio where opportunity was knocking a little louder.

Much of the “schooling” on this frontier was done in private homes with only a few students on hand, but as the population increased so did the demand for higher education.

It was a time for a college in northern Ohio and Grandison Fairchild was prominent in the founding of Oberlin College in 1833. Oberlin started as a liberal college and was the first in the United States to grant degrees to women and the first to admit black students.

George T. Fairchild

Among the students was Grandison’s son George Thompson Fairchild who graduated in 1862. Two of his brothers, James Harris Fairchild and Edward Henry Fairchild, also were Oberlin graduates. Another student was a Quaker girl from New York State named Charlotte Pearl Halsted. It wasn’t long before she and George fell in love and married.

Opportunity was knocking again and George was offered a teaching position at the new land grant college in East Lansing, Michigan. He and his bride went to the Michigan Agricultural College where his abilities soon brought him additional responsibility as acting president.

George and his children had a busy time trying to keep the wolf from the door. They were living on the edge of civilization and wild animals often tried to break through the front door of their home on the college campus. George used an old pepperbox to dispatch the wolves. And when they were older the children loved to tell how snow swirled through cracks in the house and piled up on their beds at night.

Once again opportunity knocked for this Fairchild family as it had for John Howland in Plymouth and George was called to the presidency of Kansas State Agricultural College in 1879. He labored there for 18 years, winning a national reputation for his progressive ideas on educating the farmer’s sons.

But there was much opposition to “book learning” for the sons of farmers who had known nothing but back-breaking toil. Eventually those favoring “practical education” triumphed. They gained control of the state governing body and fired all the professors.

President Fairchild resigned.

His career up to this time had included the presidency of various educational organizations but he still had something to contribute. His brother Edward Henry Fairchild was president of Berea College in Kentucky and George went to help him as vice president. When Edward died George became acting president.

Berea College was organized in 1855 and for 20 years Edward served as its president. Berea was launched to help the mountain people of Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia with “book learning” mixed with work and responsibility. Students worked for the college and learned such useful things as hotel management, restaurant operation, craft production and marketing, etc., the students earned their was while developing useful skills.

After serving several pastorates Edward had joined the Oberlin faculty and served there for 16 years until called to Berea.

He played an important role in the anti-slavery movement and once stood guard over the printing plant of an anti-slavery newspaper. He also lectured in Ohio and at least once was driven from the lecture hall by fumes of brimstone thrown upon a stove.

Edward was especially interested in coeducation at Berea – something new – and shocking to some.

Grandison Fairchild, father of 10 children, once expressed regret that all of his sons had not become full-time ministers. “They all petered out as college presidents,” he remarked.

James Harris Fairchild
Courtesy Oberlin College

In fact, the three brothers were ordained ministers including James Harris Fairchild who devoted 68 years of his live to Oberlin College. James was just a year old when the family moved from Stockbridge to Brownhelm, Ohio. He remembered running barefoot in the snow to school. He graduated from Oberlin in 1839 and became a professor of various subjects until his selection as president of the liberal institution that was a stop on the underground railway before and during the Civil War and was a major influence in the anti-slavery movement.
Many a slave running away from a degrading plantation life was helped to freedom by Oberlin faculty members and students.

James was used to tough challenges. At the age of 17 he enrolled at Oberlin and supported himself by working four hours a day in a sawmill for five cents an hour.

His influence upon Oberlin remains strong to this day as the college stresses liberal ideals and quality education.

The college president tradition carried into the next generation. Two of the three brothers who were college presidents and two of their sisters produced presidential offspring:

- Edward’s son Charles was president of Rollins College in Florida.
- Henry’s son Henry Babbitt Fairchild was president of Doane College in Nebraska.
- Cyrus Baldwin, the son of Mary Plumb Fairchild served as president of Pomona College in California.
- Frank S. Kedzie who was the son of Elizabeth Fairchild Kedzie, became president of Michigan State.

The Fairchild brothers liked to talk, of course, but they also liked to write books. James Harris Fairchild wrote “Elements of Theology” and George Thompson Fairchild was the author of “Rural Wealth and Welfare.”

David Fairchild, son of George T., became a famous plant explorer for the U.S. Agriculture Department, married the daughter of Alexander Graham Bell and wrote several best sellers including “The World Was My Garden.”

John Howland of the Mayflower would be pleased, no doubt to learn that his Fairchild descendants had produced seven college presidents. When opportunity knocked, they seized it.

This article appeared in the June 2003 issue of The Howland Quarterly.