Chittenden County Vermont Biographies

IRA ALLEN

THE FOUNDER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT

The Founder of the University of Vermont, and prominent among the Founders of the State of Vermont, soldier, financier and diplomatist, was the youngest of eight children, born to Joseph Allen and Mary Baker his wife, who were married at Woodbury, Conn., 11 March 1736. Mrs. Allen was a sister of the lamented Remember Baker whose brilliant career as soldier and patriot was so abruptly ended at St. Johns in August 1775. Of the oldest son, Ethan, the hero of Ticonderoga, there is no need to say anything here. Heman, the second son, a captain in the regiment of Green Mountain Boys, messenger to Congress of the Dorset Convention of January 1776, delegate to the convention (January 1777) which declared Vermont an independent state, as also to that (July 1777) which shaped the State constitution, and a member of the Council of Safety, died in May 1778, in consequence of fatigue and exposure undergone at the battle of Bennington nine months before. Two other brothers came from Connecticut to Vermont and died here.

Ira was born at Cornwall, Conn., 1 May 1751. His work as a practical surveyor, and the clearness and force of his writings, political and historical, show that he must have had a good common-school education. He had just passed his twenty-first year when in the fall of 1772, he came with Remember Baker, by the way of Skenesborough Falls (now Whitehall) and Lake Champlain to the lower falls of the Winooski river and began his surveys of the lands adjacent. The next spring they returned, built "Fort Frederick " just above the falls, and cut a road from that point to Castleton, a distance of seventy miles. In 1775 Ira Allen served as a lieutenant in Warner's regiment and was concerned in the movement on St. Johns and Montreal. In January of the next year he was with the army before Quebec. Soon after however he left the field for the cabinet. In spite of his youthful years he took a leading part in the Council of Safety, in negotiations, in conventions and the legislature, until Vermont, in 1791, was admitted to the Federal Union as the fourteenth of the United States.

His ready pen was as effective in drafting important state papers as in refuting the plausible arguments of New York lawyers and speculators. It was his diplomacy which averted the ruin which threatened the young republic by reason of its entanglement with the towns to the east of the Connecticut river. The withdrawal of the British in 1780 from Lake Champlain and the simultaneous disbanding of the Vermont militia could have been explained by Ira Allen and Joseph Fay. A greater mystery, the inactivity of 10,000 British troops on the northern frontier in 1781, was due to that ail-but hopeless embassy on which he started, alone, on the first of May of that year,—a most delicate and seemingly impossible task, but the successful accomplishment of which kept one-third of the British forces in North America idle, and ere long made the victory of Yorktown possible.

From 1776 to 1786 the Council of Safety was guided by his prompt and sagacious counsels more than by those of any other member, though he was the youngest of them all. From 1778 to 1787 he was the surveyor-general of the state. For eight years, 1778 to 1785, he was the treasurer of the commonwealth, whose coffers, at first empty, were promptly and punctually replenished by methods of his own devising. Between 1783 and 1794 he was eight times chosen representative from Colchester to the General Assembly, and in 1791 was a member of the constitutional convention. In 1790 he was one of seven commissioners to determine the boundary line between the former "Grants" and New York. He was also the author of the terms on which the ancient and troublesome land controversy was at last settled, and the owners of some five million acres freed from the dangers and the costs of protracted lawsuits. In 1785 the legislature designated Allen as "Agent and Delegate to Congress, Ambassador to sundry of the different States of America, and special Commissioner to the Province of Quebec." These titles must have a grandiloquent sound to one who does not remember that for fourteen years Vermont was a sovereign state. And this unique position among American commonwealths was due to no other man in so large degree as to him whose far-reaching plans for the sure building of the state were crowned in 1791 by the Founding of the State University.

In an address "to the Inhabitants of the State of Vermont" issued in November 1778 Allen had spoken of the "ample provision made in the Constitution of the State for the propagation of the Gospel, together with proper Seminaries and Schools of learning, which are among the greatest blessings God ever bestowed on the race of man." It was his offer of £4,000, first made to the Legislature in 1789, which determined the location of the institution at Burlington, instead of Williamstown or Rutland. The site selected for the future University was a plat of fifty acres from his own possessions, on a portion of which the present main building now stands. Unfortunately most of this liberal allotment of land was ere long alienated by those who had the property of the College in charge, until only an acre and a half remained ! In 1793 Allen offered an additional fifteen hundred acres of land if the Legislature would allow the University to be called by his name. And two years after he again proposed to endow the institution with an additional £1,000 in lands and £1,000 more in books and apparatus on the same conditions. Neither of these offers however met with favor in the Legislature.

One of the reasons which in 1797 Allen urged for the speedy termination of his suit before the British Court of Admiralty was his desire to "erect public buildings for the University," the materials for which he had already caused to be prepared. "These are kept," he says, "in a ruinous state by my absence." Allen's business reverses in consequence of his unforeseen detention in Europe (1795 to 1801) and vexatious lawsuits interfered sadly with his plans for organizing and equipping the College. The aid he intended and tried to render was to some extent frustrated. But no true son of the University will ever allow himself to forget the debt he owes to that far-sighted and comprehensive liberality which laid the foundations of his Alma Mater. The colony of Massachusetts endowed Harvard College at the start with £400, and that College takes its name from the man who left some £800 to the institution in his will. Ira Allen, alone, in his prime of manhood, by one single gift, offered ten times as much as the honored Massachusetts colony.

From October 1804 till his death,—far from family friends and from the state which he had, to speak guardedly, done as much as any other man to bring into being and to render a strong and stable fact—he lived in exile. His later days were spent partly in vain efforts to obtain from the legislature of Vermont an opportunity to attempt the recovery through the courts of some portions of the extensive estates of which, when he went to Europe in 1795 to purchase arms for the state militia, he was the undisputed owner; partly in revising his Natural and Political History of Vermont, first published in London in 1798; and partly in trying to set forward some commercial and political schemes of earlier days; as e.g. that of the Canal which should connect Lake Champlain with the St. Lawrence, and (so he confidently expected) contribute powerfully to the rapid development in commerce, and consequently in agriculture, of his beloved Vermont. He had procured the survey of such a canal as early as 1785, thus anticipating a project revived more than once since his day and at this hour offering the most feasible solution of the double problem of our interior and foreign commerce. He died in Philadelphia 4 January 1814 before completing his 63d year. But none can make a pilgrimage to his grave, for no one living knows where his dust was laid.

In 1893—more than a century after the University was chartered— the Trustees voted to honor Ira Allen's memory by observing the first of May, his birthday, as Founder's Day.

One thing more should be done, and without more delay. We cannot raise a shaft above his ashes, but it is possible to place a worthy Portrait of him in the central hall of the University Library. Can the Board of Trustees—can the Alumni—do less than this? Can it not be done at once? Or must we wait another—and another—year ?

If we revere our Founder's memory and honor him for his sagacious forecast and princely liberality, where, as yet, is the visible token of our reverence or of our gratitude ? If we have any pride in Ira Allen's statesmanship, or in his rare power to divine the motives and to shape the actions of other men—if we have any faith in this School of his planting, let us give proof of both This Year, by placing a speaking likeness of him on the Library walls. Not Words now but Works !

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