What Survived the Fall

Alumni and faculty of New York Central College took their convictions south after the war. Benjamin A. Boseman served as a Union Army surgeon and went on to sit in the South Carolina legislature during Reconstruction, eventually serving as postmaster of Charleston. George Boyer Vashon moved to Washington as one of the founding faculty of Howard University in 1869, helping to design its early curriculum.

Charles L. Reason returned to New York City and joined the circle of educators around the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia — a pipeline that would produce many of the first generation of formally trained Black American teachers. Grace A. Mapps taught there for decades. Together they trained the women and men who would staff the Freedmen’s Bureau schools across the South.

Edmonia Lewis, who passed briefly through McGrawville before continuing to Oberlin, became the first African and Native American woman to win international recognition as a sculptor. Her neoclassical marbles — Forever Free, The Death of Cleopatra — were exhibited from Boston to Rome, where she lived most of her adult life.

Angeline Stickney, the college’s mathematics tutor, married the astronomer Asaph Hall and performed many of the orbital calculations by which, in 1877, he discovered Phobos and Deimos, the moons of Mars. The larger crater on Phobos bears her name.

Gerrit Smith, the college’s principal patron, carried the cause of universal education forward as a benefactor of what would become Cornell University in nearby Ithaca — itself founded in 1865 on the principle of admitting any person to any study. The McGrawville experiment, so easily caricatured in its own time, was vindicated in the institutions that outlived it.

For more than a century the college was nearly forgotten. Its building burned. Its records scattered. Even its location is now marked only by a roadside plaque. This archive is one of many recent efforts to return New York Central College to the place it ought to hold in the American memory: not as a curiosity, but as a first.