William Allen Family papers

Collection

Identifier: M003

Staff Only
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Scope and Content

Correspondence, chiefly letters written by William Allen from Brunswick or Northampton, and letters to Allen's daughter, Elizabeth L. Allen, from cousins and friends. Also includes biographical material, images of William Allen, newspaper clippings, and a thimble belonging to African-American Phebe Ann Jacobs (formerly enslaved to Allen's wife Maria Wheelock; servant to the Allen family).

Dates

Creation: 1805-1970, undated
Creation: Majority of material found within 1805 - 1862

Biographical/Historical Note

William Allen (1784-1868) was a Congregational minister, author, and college president. A graduate of Harvard (1802), he served as regent there from 1804 to 1810, when he took over his father's parish in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. In 1817 he became president of the short-lived Dartmouth University, leaving Dartmouth for Bowdoin College when the University was dissolved.

Allen became Bowdoin's third president, serving, with one interruption, from 1820 to 1839. He worked to establish the Medical School of Maine and to lead the College through the formation of the new state of Maine in 1820. Information on Allen's tenure is available in the William Allen Administrative Records. He retired to Northampton, Massachusetts in 1839.

Allen married Maria Malleville Wheelock, daughter of Dartmouth College president John Wheelock, in 1812; the couple had eight children. Maria M. Allen died in 1828. In 1831, Allen married Sarah Johnson.

Allen's papers are supplemented by his published writings, among them three editions of the American Biographical Dictionary, Junius Unmasked, and many sermons and theological works.