Wheelock, Eleazer, Dd

Wheelock, Eleazer, D.D.

a Congregational minister, was born at Windham, Conn., in May, 1711, and graduated from Yale College in 1733. In March, 1735, he was ordained minister of the Second Church in Lebanon, called "Lebanon Crank," now Columbia. In the great Whitefieldian revival Mr. Wheelock engaged with great zeal and energy. After the religious excitement had subsided, he added to his labors as a minister the duties of a teacher. Samson Occum, a Mohegan Indian, who afterwards became a distinguished preacher, was a pupil in, his school in 1743. He soon formed the plan of an Indian Missionary School, and several Indian boys entered it, chiefly maintained by subscriptions from the legislatures of Connecticut and Massachusetts. The institution received the name of Moor's Indian Charity School, Joshua Moor having made a donation of a house and two acres of land about the year 1754. Mr. Occum and Rev. Nathaniel Whitaker solicited funds for the school in Great Britain in 1766, the amount realized being £7000 in England, and more than £2000 in Scotland. After conducting this school in Lebanon over fourteen ears, he determined to transfer it to New Hampshire, and a charter was obtained for a college, with about 40,000 acres of land, as an endowment from governor Wettworth and others. Thus originated at Hanover, N. H., Dartmouth College; but Moor's school was maintained there for along time as a separate institution. In August, 1770, Dr. Wheelock went to Hanover, built a log cabin in what was then a wilderness, and put up his school-building, eighty feet long and two stories in height.; Among the first graduates was his son John, who succeeded to the presidency of the college. As a teacher Dr. Wheelock was industrious and successful. He died April 24,1779. Dr. Wheelock published, Narrative of the Indian Charity School at Lebanon (1762): — Narratives, in several numbers, from 1763 to 1771: — Continuation of the Narrative, to which is Added an Abstract of a Mission to the Delaware Indians West of the Ohio (1773): — A Sermon on Liberty of Conscience, or No King but Christ in the Church (1775): — and an occasional Sermon. His Memoirs, by Drs. McClure and Parish, were published in 1811. See Sprague, Annals of the Amer. Pulpit, 1, 397. Wheelock. John, D.D., LL.D., an American clergyman, was born at Lebanon, Conn., Jan. 28, 1754. He entered Yale College in 1767, but removed with his father Dr. Eleazer Wheelock, to Hanover, N. H., in 1770, and graduated at Dartmouth College in 1771; was tutor there from 1772 to 1776; was elected to the Colonial Assembly in 1775; appointed major in the New York forces in 1777, and soon after lieutenant-colonel in the Continental army; commanded an expedition against the Indians in 1778, and soon after was placed on general Gates's staff. At the death of his father in 1779, although only twenty-five years of age, he was chosen his successor as president of Dartmouth College; was sent to England to raise money and supplies for the college in 1783, but lost what he had collected by shipwreck off Cape Cod; was removed from his office in consequence of an ecclesiastical controversy in 1815, but restored in 1817, and died soon after, April 4, 1817. He left half of his large estate to Princeton Theological Seminary. He published a Eulogy on Prof. John Smith, D.D. (1809): — and Sketches of Dartmouth College (1816).