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In September 1638, a young minister named John Harvard died in Charlestown, Massachusetts, of consumption. He was thirty years old, had been in the colony barely a year, and had never taught a single class at the institution that would bear his name. Yet his deathbed decision, to leave half his estate and the whole of his library to a fledgling school in the village of New Towne, gave that school something it had not yet managed to acquire in two years of uncertain existence: a reason for anyone to remember it.
The school would rename the village Cambridge in his honour. It would spend the next three centuries becoming the most powerful educational institution in the western hemisphere. Harvard University history 1636, began with a legislative vote and £400 is the story of how that happened, told through the people who built it, ran it, quarrelled over it, and occasionally tried to destroy it.
A school born from fear of an uneducated ministry
The vote that created Harvard College took place on 28 October 1636, in the General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony. The amount committed was £400, a significant sum for a settlement that had existed for only six years and was still uncertain of its own survival. The stated reason, recorded in a pamphlet called New England’s First Fruits published in 1643, was blunt: the colonists feared what would happen when the current generation of Cambridge-educated ministers died. “dreading to leave an illiterate Ministry to the Churches,” they wrote, “when our present Ministers shall lie in the Dust.”
The school that resulted was placed in New Towne, a small settlement west of Boston, and renamed Cambridge in a direct act of institutional nostalgia. Most of the founding ministers had been educated at Cambridge in England, and the new institution was intended to replicate what they had known there: a place that formed men for the ministry and for civil leadership.
The first person appointed to run it was Nathaniel Eaton, a Cambridge-educated scholar who arrived with impressive credentials and almost immediately revealed himself to be brutal. Eaton beat his students with a walnut tree cudgel, underfed them, allowed them to live in accommodation a contemporary described as unfit for a jail, and was eventually dismissed in 1639 after his assistant, Nathaniel Briscoe, brought formal charges against him. Eaton fled to Virginia to escape his creditors, and the school he left behind had no students, no master, and barely a building to its name. It had been open, in the loosest sense, for two years.
John Harvard: the man behind the name
John Harvard was born in Southwark, London, in 1607, the son of Robert Harvard, a butcher and innkeeper, and Katherine Rogers, whose father Thomas Rogers had emigrated to Plymouth Colony on the Mayflower in 1620. John attended Emmanuel College, Cambridge, graduating BA in 1632 and MA in 1635. He married Ann Sadler in 1636 and sailed for New England the following year, intending to serve as a minister.
He died before he could properly begin. The bequest he left comprised approximately £779 and a library of around 400 volumes — a library that, in a colony that had almost no books at all, represented something close to intellectual capital. The General Court named the college in his honour in March 1639. His portrait, if one ever existed, has not survived. The famous image associated with him at Harvard today is not a likeness of John Harvard at all; it depicts an unknown student from a later period. The precise location of his burial is not known.
What can be said is that without his bequest, the institution that became Harvard University might simply have closed. The timing of his death, and the generosity of the terms of his will, kept it alive at its most precarious moment.
Henry Dunster and the shape of a real college
The man who actually built Harvard College was Henry Dunster, appointed its first president in 1640 at the age of approximately thirty. Dunster arrived from Lancashire, England, where he had been educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and had served as a schoolmaster. He found the college in ruins. He rebuilt it from almost nothing.
In fourteen years as president, Dunster drafted the first curriculum, established the system of tutors that would define Harvard’s teaching structure for generations, oversaw the construction of the first proper college building (the original Harvard Hall, completed in 1642 and later destroyed by fire), and instituted the first commencement ceremony in 1642, at which nine students received degrees. He also managed the college’s finances, negotiated its relationship with the General Court, and served simultaneously as its teacher, administrator, and chief fundraiser.
He was removed from office in 1654. The reason was theological. Dunster had come to believe that infant baptism lacked scriptural foundation, and he said so publicly in 1653 during the baptism of his own child. In the colony’s theocratic culture this was not merely a private religious opinion; it was a challenge to the established order. The authorities moved against him with remarkable speed. He resigned the presidency, was prosecuted before the Middlesex County Court, and was required to leave Cambridge. He died in Scituate, Massachusetts, in 1659, not yet fifty years old, still believing what had cost him everything.
The records of Dunster’s presidency survive in the Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and include his personal papers, correspondence with the General Court, and documents relating to the early student body.
The difficult middle years: presidents who struggled
The four presidencies that followed Dunster’s illustrate how fragile the institution remained. Charles Chauncy, a Devon-born minister who had previously tangled with the authorities in England over his refusal to bow at the name of Jesus, served from 1654 to 1672 and provided a period of relative stability, though he was elderly throughout and the college remained underfunded. Leonard Hoar, a Harvard alumnus who had taken his MD at Cambridge in England, succeeded him in 1672 and lasted only three years before the students organised a systematic campaign against him. Contemporary accounts describe the students writing hostile letters, refusing to attend classes, and eventually withdrawing from the college in sufficient numbers to force Hoar’s resignation in 1675. He died within months of leaving office.
Urian Oakes served as acting president for several years and then as full president from 1680 until his death in 1681. John Rogers followed him and died in office in 1684 after less than a year. By this point Harvard had had six presidents in thirty years, four of whom had either been forced out or died in harness. That the institution survived this period at all is in itself remarkable.
Increase Mather and the battle over Harvard’s soul
The figure who dominated Harvard’s late seventeenth century was not primarily an educator but a minister and political operator: Increase Mather, born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 1639, the son of the Puritan minister Richard Mather. Increase served as president from 1685 to 1701, though he spent much of his tenure in London negotiating a new royal charter for Massachusetts and left the day-to-day running of the college to tutors. His son Cotton Mather, born in Boston in 1663 and already one of the most prolific writers in New England, was deeply invested in the college’s direction and had expected to succeed his father in the presidency.
He did not. The appointment instead went to Samuel Willard, and then in 1707 to John Leverett, a lawyer and former tutor who was the first layman ever to hold the Harvard presidency. For Cotton Mather, this was a humiliation. Leverett represented a liberalising tendency in the college’s governance, a movement away from the tight Congregationalist control the Mathers had sought to maintain, and Cotton Mather spent years attempting to undermine him. He channelled his ambitions instead into supporting the foundation of Yale College in 1701, which was partly conceived as a more reliably orthodox alternative to a Harvard he felt was slipping from its founding purposes.
Leverett served until 1724. Under his presidency the college began, slowly, to become something other than a seminary.
Thomas Hollis and the first endowed professorships
In 1721, a London merchant named Thomas Hollis gave Harvard College a sum of money sufficient to endow a professorship of divinity, the first endowed chair in the history of American higher education. Hollis had no personal connection to New England. He was a Baptist, which made his gift to a Congregationalist institution an act of deliberate ecumenism. He stipulated that the Hollis Professorship of Divinity should be open to a minister of any denomination.
Hollis subsequently funded a professorship of mathematics and natural philosophy, sent books and scientific instruments, and continued to support the college until his death in 1731. His nephew, also named Thomas Hollis, continued the family’s patronage in subsequent decades. The Hollis professorships survive to this day; the chair of divinity is among the oldest continuously held academic posts in the United States.
The Hollis gifts illustrate a pattern that would shape Harvard’s development throughout the eighteenth century: the college’s survival and growth depended heavily on individual benefactors, many of them merchants with no academic background, whose motivations ranged from piety to civic pride to the desire to see their names attached to something permanent.
Massachusetts Hall, the yard, and the people who built them
The physical expansion of Harvard in the early eighteenth century left a documentary record that is unusually useful to genealogists. Massachusetts Hall, completed in 1720 and still standing as the oldest surviving Harvard building, was built using local labour. The accounts for its construction, preserved in the Harvard University Archives, include payments to named craftsmen: carpenters, masons, bricklayers, and glaziers drawn largely from the towns of Cambridge, Watertown, and Charlestown.
These are not famous names. They do not appear in histories of the college. But they are real people, and their descendants are real people searching for them. A family researching ancestors in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, in the 1710s and 1720s has a reasonable chance of finding a forebear in the construction records of Massachusetts Hall or in the college’s steward’s accounts from the same period.
The college’s servants appear in a different set of records. Harvard maintained a small staff throughout the colonial period: a steward who managed provisions, a butler who was responsible for the buttery (the college’s store of food and drink), and various domestic servants whose names appear in account books and occasionally in legal records when disputes arose. Benjamin Wadsworth, who served as president from 1725 to 1737, kept detailed household accounts that record expenditure on servants’ wages and provisions. These accounts are held in the Harvard University Archives.
The college in revolution and early republic
When the American Revolutionary War began in 1775, Harvard College was evacuated. The Continental Army under George Washington used the college’s buildings, including Massachusetts Hall, as barracks and a hospital. Students and faculty dispersed. The library was moved to Concord for safekeeping. The college did not fully resume normal operations until 1776.
Edward Holyoke, who served as president from 1737 to 1769, had built the college into a more substantial institution than it had ever previously been: student numbers grew, new buildings were added, and the curriculum expanded. But it was still, by the standards of what it would become, a small provincial institution. In 1780, the Massachusetts Constitution formally incorporated it as a university rather than a college, though it continued in practice to call itself Harvard College for most purposes.
The figure who begins to transform Harvard into a genuinely national institution is John Thornton Kirkland, president from 1810 to 1828. Under Kirkland, the professional schools – law, divinity, medicine – were consolidated and expanded, the faculty grew substantially, and Harvard began to attract students from across the United States rather than primarily from New England. The Harvard Medical School, founded in 1782, moved to a permanent building in Boston under his presidency. The Law School, which had existed in various forms since 1817, was placed on a permanent footing.
Genealogy research note: tracing ancestors connected to Harvard
For anyone researching an ancestor with a connection to Harvard University in the colonial or early national period, the primary repository is the Harvard University Archives, located in Pusey Library on the Harvard campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The archives hold student records, faculty records, corporation minutes, financial accounts, steward’s books, and correspondence dating back to the seventeenth century.
Student records from the colonial period are partial but substantial. The Quinquennial Catalogue of the Officers and Graduates of Harvard University 1636–1930, published in 1930 and now in the public domain, lists every known graduate with dates and degrees. It is searchable on Archive.org. For students who attended but did not graduate, the archives hold class records and tutor’s notebooks that may include names.
Non-student records are less well known but often more valuable to genealogists. The steward’s accounts from the eighteenth century record payments to local tradesmen and servants by name. The construction records for major buildings, including Massachusetts Hall (1718–1720) and Harvard Hall (rebuilt 1766), include named craftsmen. These records are held in the Harvard University Archives and can be accessed in person or through the archives’ reference service.
The New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS), based in Boston, holds complementary records for Middlesex County, Massachusetts, including probate records, land deeds, and church records that can help place Harvard-connected individuals within their family and community context. Their database, AmericanAncestors.org, is a subscription service and one of the most useful tools available for New England research of this period.
The Massachusetts State Archives holds colonial court records, tax lists, and military records that frequently intersect with Harvard’s history. For the Revolutionary War period specifically, the Massachusetts Archives Collection includes muster rolls and pension applications that may document individuals whose paths crossed with Harvard during the army’s occupation of the college.
For graduates of the nineteenth century, Harvard’s own Annual Report series, published from 1825 onward, and the class secretary’s reports and class albums that were produced from the 1850s onward, provide remarkable genealogical detail: names, dates of birth, occupations, family relationships, and death notices. Many of these are now digitised through the Harvard Library’s digital collections portal.
Named individuals index
| Name | Dates | Role / connection |
|---|---|---|
| John Harvard | 1607–1638 | Southwark-born minister; left bequest of £779 and 400 volumes to found the college |
| Nathaniel Eaton | c.1609–1674 | First master of Harvard College; dismissed 1639 for brutality toward students |
| Nathaniel Briscoe | fl. 1639 | Eaton’s assistant; brought formal charges against Eaton before the authorities |
| Henry Dunster | c.1609–1659 | First president 1640–1654; built the college from ruins; removed over his views on infant baptism |
| Charles Chauncy | 1592–1672 | Second president 1654–1672; born in Hertfordshire; previously in trouble with English church authorities |
| Leonard Hoar | 1630–1675 | Third president 1672–1675; Harvard alumnus; forced to resign by student opposition |
| Urian Oakes | 1631–1681 | Acting and then full president 1680–1681; died in office |
| John Rogers | 1630–1684 | President 1682–1684; died in office |
| Increase Mather | 1639–1723 | President 1685–1701; Dorchester-born; spent much of his term in London negotiating the colonial charter |
| Cotton Mather | 1663–1728 | Son of Increase Mather; Boston-born minister; influential in Harvard’s governance disputes; supported Yale’s founding |
| Richard Mather | 1596–1669 | Father of Increase Mather; Puritan minister; part of the intellectual world surrounding early Harvard |
| Samuel Willard | 1640–1707 | Vice president acting as president 1701–1707; passed over Cotton Mather for the role |
| John Leverett | 1662–1724 | President 1707–1724; first layman to hold the Harvard presidency |
| Thomas Hollis | 1659–1731 | London merchant and Baptist; funded first endowed professorships in American higher education |
| Benjamin Wadsworth | 1670–1737 | President 1725–1737; his household accounts survive in the Harvard University Archives |
| Edward Holyoke | 1689–1769 | President 1737–1769; longest-serving Harvard president of the eighteenth century |
| John Thornton Kirkland | 1770–1840 | President 1810–1828; consolidated the professional schools; transformed Harvard into a national institution |
| Thomas Rogers | c.1571–1621 | Katherine Rogers’s father; John Harvard’s maternal grandfather; sailed to Plymouth on the Mayflower in 1620 |
| Robert Harvard | d. 1625 | John Harvard’s father; butcher and innkeeper of Southwark, London |
| Katherine Rogers Harvard | fl. 1600s | John Harvard’s mother; daughter of Mayflower passenger Thomas Rogers |
| Ann Sadler Harvard | fl. 1630s | John Harvard’s wife; married 1636; survived him and later remarried |
Further reading for Harvard University History 1636:
Harvard Medical School history 1782: the forgotten physicians who build American medicine – Harvard Medical School History 1782
Harvard University Archives: https://library.harvard.edu/libraries/harvard-university-archives – primary archive for all Harvard historical records
The Quinquennial Catalogue (1930) on Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/quinquennialcata00harv – public domain graduate listing 1636–1930
New England Historic Genealogical Society: https://www.americanancestors.org – subscription database for New England genealogy including Harvard-connected families
Massachusetts Historical Society: https://www.masshist.org – holds the Burgis engraving and related colonial-era Harvard materials
Harvard Library Digital Collections: https://library.harvard.edu/services-tools/curiosity-digital-collections-gallery – digitised historical records and images
Researching your own genealogy: https://universityhistoryarchive.org/genealogist – the Genealogist
