14 Facts About Eleazar Wheelock

Eleazar Wheelock was an American Congregational minister, orator, and educator in present-day Columbia, Connecticut, for 35 years before founding Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

Eleazar Wheelock had tutored Samson Occom, a Mohegan who became a Presbyterian minister and the second Native American to publish writings in English.

Eleazar Wheelock was born in Windham, Connecticut, to Ralph Wheelock and Ruth Huntington, who had a prosperous farm of 300 acres.

Eleazar Wheelock is the great-grandson of the first teacher of the first free school in the United States, the Rev Ralph Wheelock.

Eleazar Wheelock married a second time to Mary Brinsmead, a widow with two children.

Eleazar Wheelock acted as an itinerant preacher during the Great Awakening, a religious revival that had begun to sweep the Connecticut River Valley around the time of his graduation from Yale.

Eleazar Wheelock was one of its greatest proponents in the state, serving as the "chief intelligencer of revival news".

In 1743, Eleazar Wheelock took in a student named Samson Occom, a Mohegan who knew English and had converted to Christianity in his childhood.

Eleazar Wheelock taught Occom for four years; the youth was a ready student, learning to read and write in Hebrew as well as deeply studying theology.

Eleazar Wheelock returned to Connecticut to preach to the Mohegan and later organized Christian Indians as the Brothertown Indians.

Eleazar Wheelock planned to teach the boys in both secular and Christian subjects, so they could return to their native culture as missionaries.

Eleazar Wheelock began to search for another location for the schools.

Eleazar Wheelock kept the lord's donation and named the college after him, as Dartmouth College.

Eleazar Wheelock chose Hanover, New Hampshire, for the location and became the college's president.