Uncle Tom's Cabin was begun in a small Maine college town
Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, is tiny, yet its orbit includes Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a US president and the town where Harriet Beecher Stowe started writing Uncle Tom's Cabin. Its polar bear mascot honours an alumnus who claimed to reach the North Pole. Today it admits fewer than one applicant in fifteen.
Massachusetts lawmakers chartered the college in 1794, naming it after former governor James Bowdoin, whose son was an early donor; it later came under the Maine Legislature. It grew in the 1820s after Maine became a state under the Missouri Compromise. Franklin Pierce studied there alongside Hawthorne and Longfellow, and Pierce and Hawthorne formed a militia company, the Bowdoin Cadets. Early admission demanded a certificate of good moral character plus Latin, Greek, algebra and familiarity with Cicero, Virgil and Homer.
The Civil War era ran through campus. Stowe began her anti-slavery novel while her husband taught there. Joshua Chamberlain, an alumnus and professor, defended Little Round Top at Gettysburg with the 20th Maine, witnessed the surrender at Appomattox, and later led both Maine and the college. Oliver Otis Howard headed the Freedmen's Bureau and founded Howard University. Yet the college also gave Jefferson Davis an honorary degree; an award named for him, created in 1972, was dropped in 2015.
Exploration became part of its identity. Robert Peary, class of 1877, named a fjord and glacier after Bowdoin and claimed to lead the first expedition to the North Pole in April 1909. Donald MacMillan, one of his crew, sailed the schooner Bowdoin around Greenland, Baffin Island and Labrador for decades, and the polar bear became the mascot in 1913.
Change came in the 1970s: SAT scores became optional in 1970, and in 1971 women enrolled for the first time, ending almost 180 years of male-only education. In 2008 it replaced loans with grants for all students on financial aid, and in 2023 Safa Zaki became its first woman president. For the class of 2030 it admitted just 6.5% of applicants, who arrived in record numbers.
Source: Bowdoin College
