Bowdoin’s Prodigal Son
Alfred Upham was born in 1804 at Rochester, New Hampshire. He was the younger brother of Thomas Cogswell Upham, who was chosen as Bowdoin’s first professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy in 1824. He was also the son of Nathaniel Upham, a prosperous trader in Rochester. Upham grew up close to William Hale, who lived in neighboring Dover, New Hampshire. When the Rochester boy was 17 he moved to Brunswick and began his Bowdoin education. Upham spent his first year boarding at the Honorable B. Orr’s with John Badger. He spent the first semester of his sophomore year living with Alfred Martin, Cullen Sawtelle, William Stone, and Joseph Edwards Vose at Misses’ Toppan’s. Then in the spring, Upham and his housemates moved back to Orr’s where six other classmates resided. As an underclassman, Upham joined the Athenean Society. Upham was fined often by the Executive Government, almost always for absences from prayers or recitations. By the end of his sophomore year, the college had seemingly had enough of Upham. In July of 1823 the Government voted that the President write to Upham’s father, “requesting him to remove his son from college on account of his intemperate habits.”
There is conflicting information about whether Upham continued his undergraduate education at Bowdoin or received a bachelor’s degree from the school. The General Catalogue of Bowdoin College lists Upham as a graduate of the Class of 1825 and there is an alumni file with information on him. However, Upham is not listed in any college directories after 1823, his name is not included among the names of the graduates in the 1825 Commencement materials, and he does not appear among the list of students on which the Board of Overseers and the Board of Trustees voted to confer degrees. Despite this, Upham is reported as having taken classes at Bowdoin’s Maine Medical School in 1832 and received both a master’s degree and an honorary degree from the college in 1848. Despite the “intemperate habits” of his youth, Upham was clearly able to redeem himself in the eyes of the college. Along with his Bowdoin degrees, Upham also received an M.D. from Dartmouth in 1834. This reflected his choice to become a physician, a career which he spent decades practicing in Manhattan. Upham died in New York City in 1878 at the age of 74.