Multiplying Grads Outstrip Scribe

The College is fighting a losing battle with time as it attempts to record the lives of its alumni over the past 915 years. More men are being graduated each year than are being written up.

If the pace continues, the College will be over 100,000 graduates behind at the end of this century: it will be some time after 2300 A. D. before the public can read the biographies of the Class of 1951.

To date, seven volumes of Sibley's Harvard Graduates have appeared covering 84 classes and about 800 graduates. The eighth volume--1726 through 1730 will appear this spring and bring the total to 1,091.

21 Long Years

In 1857, John Langdon Sibley, Class of 1825, began recording the lives of College graduates starting with the first class. He completed the first three volumes, devoting 21 years to the task.

Sibley left an endowment, now totaling over $250,000, for the continuation of his work. After a lapse of many years, Clifford K. Shipton '26, Custodian of the University Archives, has continued where Sibley left off.

From the volume published this spring, a couple of alumni stand out. First is Solomon Prentice, Class of 1727, otherwise known as the Reverend and crazy Mr. Prentice.

The man, a fundamentalist, was a proponent of the "Great Awakening." Prentice was at his best preaching sermons, which caused "A Young woman of about 14 years of Age...such wraking Horror and Distress about her soul, which she that was dropping into Hell, that she Cryed out at that rate she might be heard far off."

Drunkenness and Adultery

But Prentice, had more troubles. His wife had visions and revelations and decided she was immortal, joining a sect of that type. She and her associates spent large portions of their time blowing rams' horns around churches to bring them down like the walls of Jericho.

His later days passed in relative quiet with only an occasional charge of drunkenness, fornication, and adultery, but he was blessed with a son who printed money "independently of the government."

Another graduate whose life appears in the new volume is Peter Oliver, Class of 1730. His first act was the paying of a fine to avoid serving as a town constable, an office to which he had been duly elected.

Oliver subsequently became a chief justice in Massachusetts but was very unpopular because of his pro-British sentiments in the years before the Revolution. Several impeachments failed to remove him, but finally a mob dragged the judge from his bench only to let him escape. The next day an armed guard protected Oliver successfully.

His loyalist tendencies caused him to floe the Colonies in 1776 and stay in England for the rest of his life.

Shipton, in discussing the slow pace of the investigations, explained that he, as a colonial historian, was only concerned with classes up to 1799. He admitted that the College was losing its race with posterity.

Finding Lost Men

He added that the 19th and 20th centuries were none of his business. Biographies of graduates in these centuries, although begun in class reports, will be equally, if not more, difficulty to obtain, as alumni were beginning to spread over the entire globe in this period. It could take years to locate men who were missing from their own class reports.

Shipton is writing for a very limited audience. Five hundred copies of each volume are printed, of which fewer than 450 are sold. This may have its advantages though, for it costs the University $15 to print each copy, while the retail price is $5.