What Survived the Fall

By the late 1850s, New York Central College was in severe financial trouble. The national Panic of 1857 worsened an already fragile situation, and Gerrit Smith, one of the college’s most important benefactors, became tied to the school’s property and debts.

The crisis surrounding John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry weakened Smith’s ability to support the institution at the very moment the college needed him most. Around 1859–1860, New York Central College ceased collegiate instruction.

The property did not simply disappear. In 1864, the site was reorganized as New York Central Academy, a more conventional local school. Later, the property became part of the McGrawville Union School story and, eventually, the modern school grounds. The radical college was gone, but its people continued the work elsewhere.

New York Central College’s legacy can be seen most clearly in the lives of those who carried its ideals into the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Benjamin A. Boseman, a Black student connected to the college, later became a physician and served as a Union Army surgeon. After the war, he entered public life in South Carolina, serving in the state legislature and as postmaster of Charleston during Reconstruction.

George Boyer Vashon, one of the college’s Black professors, continued his work as a lawyer, scholar, and educator. After the Civil War, he taught at institutions including Howard University and Alcorn University, bringing his intellectual force into the expanding world of Black higher education.

The college’s strongest afterlife was in education. Charles L. Reason, the first Black professor at New York Central College, relocated to Philadelphia to lead the Institute for Colored Youth, one of the most important Black educational institutions in the country.

Grace A. Mapps, who completed her studies at New York Central College in 1852, also became connected to the Institute for Colored Youth as an educator. Her life shows how the college helped prepare Black women for positions of intellectual and professional authority at a time when most institutions excluded them.

Erastus Milo Cravath, a former student associated with New York Central College, later became a founding figure and first president of Fisk University. This connection should be presented through Cravath himself, not as a direct institutional succession.

Mary Edmonia Lewis studied at New York Central College from 1856 to 1858 before continuing to Oberlin. Of African American and Native American heritage, she later moved to Rome and became an internationally recognized neoclassical sculptor.

Her works, including Forever Free and The Death of Cleopatra, made her one of the most remarkable artists of the nineteenth century. Her presence at McGrawville shows that the college’s reach extended beyond politics and education into the world of art and cultural memory.

Angeline Stickney graduated with the college’s first formal class in 1855 and taught mathematics while completing her education. She later married astronomer Asaph Hall, who had also been connected to the college.

Stickney’s mathematical ability and support were central to Hall’s scientific work. In 1877, Hall discovered Phobos and Deimos, the moons of Mars. The largest crater on Phobos now bears Stickney’s name.

New York Central College did not become Cornell University, Howard University, Oberlin College, or Fisk University. Its legacy is not a simple line of institutional descent.

Its real legacy is a human one. Former students and faculty carried its ideas into other schools, reform movements, public offices, art studios, classrooms, churches, and postwar institutions. The college failed as an organization, but its people continued to move through American history.

For more than a century, New York Central College remained far less known than it deserved to be. Its records were scattered, its buildings were absorbed into later local school history, and the national story of higher education largely passed it by.

Today, its memory is being recovered through local historians, the McGraw Historical Society, Cortland County Historical Society, New York Heritage materials, SUNY Cortland projects, the historic marker, the college cemetery, walking trails, and documentary work such as A Beacon on the Hill.

The story is no longer just about a school that disappeared. It is about a radical experiment whose influence survived through the people it educated.