1817-1892
Adoniram Judson Chaplin
Baptist Pastor MA/NY
Adoniram Judson Chaplin was born in Danvers, MA, 15 February 1817, to Marcia O’Brien and Jeremiah Chaplin, the first president of Maine Literary and Theological Institute (now Colby College). He was the first child born to this couple and was followed by four sisters and one brother, Jeremiah Chaplin, who became an influential Baptist pastor in Boston.
Led by Baptists, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on 27 February 1813, adopted a petition to establish the Maine Literary and Theological Institution in Waterville where citizens had donated 179 acres to attract the new school to their town. The first president, Jeremiah Chaplin with a wife and one-year-old son, Adoniram Judson Chaplin, opened classes in 1818 in a vacant house. President Chaplin served for 15 years in this founding role establishing many precedents for this academic startup.
Five years later, in 1818, Maine separated from Massachusetts allowing Missouri to join the Union as a slave state and Maine to join as a free state. Under the new Maine charter, Maine Literary and Theological Institute took on a distinctive Baptist flavor. Students could not be denied admission based on religion, Board members would not be required to pass a religious test, and the name of the institution was changed to Waterville College in 1821. Young Adoniram Judson Chaplin spent his first 15 years watching his father make these changes as president of the school. (In 1867 the name of the school was changed to Colby University in appreciation of Baptist philanthropist, Gardner Colby, who revitalized the school after the Civil War. The institution finally settled on Colby College in 1899.)
The son of this Baptist college president, Adoniram Judson Chaplin, graduated from New York’s Baptist Educational Foundation (now Colgate University) in 1845, the year Adoniram Judson, Jr., came to the States for his only furlough. In the 1850 U. S. census, when he is 33, Chaplin lived in Dover, NY. Ten years later, when he was 43, he lived in Conway, MA, where he was serving as pastor of the Baptist congregation and where he married Ada Cornelia Coffin on 18 September 1860. By 1870 he was living in Conway, MA, again leading this same congregation after pastoring for a few years in New York (1865-68 at Castle Creek and 1868-69 at Candor).
Ada Chaplin died after 23 years of marriage on 9 December 1883, in Conway, MA, and was eulogized by those who knew her.
Few women of her age have accomplished as much. Talented and gifted with rare Christian graces her early death is an irreparable loss to her husband, her friends and the church in which she bore so active a part. Her dying words, prepared by her own hand for her funeral services, will not soon be forgotten by those who listened to them. Rest in peace, dear one, for thy work was well done and its influence shall never die.[1]
A. J. Chaplin’s final pastorates were
- 1874-84. Baptist Church, Mansfield Center, CT
- 1887-88. First Baptist Church, Colrain, MA
- 1889-91. Tabernacle Baptist Church, Ithaca, NY
Adoniram Judson Chaplin died on 29 January 1892, in Conway, MA, two days before the death of Charles Hadden Spurgeon in Menton, France. Chaplin is buried in Ithaca, NY.
We can guess that Jeremiah and Marcia Chaplin might have attended the first meeting of the Triennial Convention in 1814 and there learned of the Congregational missionary Adoniram Judson and his conversion to the Baptist faith. The young couple named their first child in appreciation of the missionary spirit that motivated Ann and Adoniram Judson, Jr., to venture to Burma.
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[1] Gazette and Courier (Greenfield, MA), Dec 24, 1883, p. 2.