The Project Gutenberg EBook of The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6,
June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886, by Various

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Title: The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886

Author: Various

Release Date: April 13, 2008 [EBook #25064]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NEW ENGLAND MAGAZINE, JUNE 1886 ***

Produced by Joshua Hutchinson, Josephine Paolucci and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net.
(This file was produced from images generously made
available by Cornell University Digital Collections).

THE

NEW ENGLAND MAGAZINE

AND

BAY STATE MONTHLY.

OLD SERIES JUNE, 1886. NEW SERIES

VOL. IV. NO. 6. VOL. I. NO. 6.

Copyright, 1886, by Bay State Monthly Company. All rights reserved.

Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved
to the end of the article.

WILLIAMS COLLEGE.

BY REV. N. H. EGLESTON.

Williams College has something peculiar and romantic in its history, as
well as in its site amid the beautiful hills of Berkshire. It had its
birth upon the very frontiers of civilization, and amid the throes of
that struggle which was to decide finally whether the control of this
continent, and the permanent shaping of its institutions and its destiny
were to be French or English. The nascent colleges of Colorado, Dakota,
and Oregon are relatively to-day in the position held by Williams when
it was founded.

Col. Ephraim Williams, from whom the college takes its name, had been an
active participant in the struggle to which we have alluded. He had been
commissioned by the General Court of Massachusetts to construct and
command a line of forts along the northern border of settlements from
the Connecticut River on the east to the valley of the Hoosac on the
west. This line coincided nearly with the northern boundary of
Massachusetts; all above, to the borders of Canada, being then a
wilderness, through which the roaming savages often burst with sudden
violence upon the settlements of the English colonist