The Foreign MIssion School, Cornwall, Connecticut

This brief experiment in Native American higher education had every chance of working, but for two love stories marred by racial prejudice.  Jedidiah Morse, the father of F.B. Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, believed that young men from non-White races could be trained as missionaries to their respective people.  He conceived of the idea of a seminary to train such young men as missionaries.  To that end, the Foreign Mission School was established in 1816 in Cornwall, Connecticut.  This wasn't the first opportunity for Native men to receive a University level education.  Both Yale and what would later become Dartmouth also had auxiliary schools for non-White students.  Herman Daggett, the nephew of Yale College president Naphtali Daggett was a headmaster at the school, as well as Timothy Dwight, who also had Yale connections.

The first students at the school were Native Hawaiians.  Henry Opukahaia was a young Hawaiian who'd been abandoned in Connecticut by his ship.  He enrolled at the school and appreciated it so much that he began recruiting among other Native Hawaiians.  Eventually seven Native Hawaiians would receive missionary training at the school, along with one Hindu, a Bengali, two Chinese and two Malay.  Two White students were also enrolled, but the overwhelming majority of the student body was Native, mostly mixed race.  In addition to a typical University curriculum of astronomy, calculus, theology, geography, chemistry, navigation and surveying, French, Greek and Latin, the students were required to do missionary work in the local community.  They also learned practical courses such as blacksmithing and barrel-making.  The aim was to make them self-sufficient preachers, teachers and even translators in a foreign missionary assignment.

Then, in the early 1820's, two young mixed-race Cherokee boys did what college students have done since there has been college students, cultivate an interest in the opposite sex.  Two local girls from prominent families didn't find John Ridge and Elias Boudinot all that bad, and were dead-set on marrying them, even if that meant moving far away from homes and families to Cherokee Country.  Local public opinion, though, wasn't as moonstruck as the two girls.  In fact, they were angry and demanded the school's closure, which occurred in 1826.  Among the notable alumns were Cherokee David Brown, James Fields, Leonard Hicks, David Carter, John Vann, Choctaw McKee and Israel Folsom, Delaware Adin Gibbs, Osage Robert Monroe and Stephen van Renssalear (named for the general), among others.

The Steward's House of the Foreign Mission School still stands and is a National Historic Landmark.