William Allen’s A Decade of Addresses. Portland: Samuel Colman, 1830.
William Allen (1784-1868) was a Congregational minister, author, and Bowdoin College president. A graduate of Harvard (1802), he served as regent there from 1804 to 1810, when he took over his father's parish in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. In 1817 he became president of the short-lived Dartmouth University, leaving Dartmouth for Bowdoin when the University was dissolved. Allen became Bowdoin’s third president, serving, with one interruption, from 1820 to 1839. He worked to establish the Medical School of Maine and to lead the College through the formation of the new state of Maine in 1820. In his inaugural address at Bowdoin, Allen waxes poetic on momentousness nature of statehood (Maine is now the “northern star”) and the grand role that Bowdoin, as its principal learning institute, will play—brightening the world with the “genius of her sons” like the aurora borealis brightens the night sky.