A Letter to Acadia College

Nova Scotia # 10 on December 12, 1866 cover from Halifax to Wolfville, Nova Scotia. Addressed to Mr. William McKinley, Acadia College, N.S. Backstamps from H(alifax) N.S. DE 13, 1866, with further partial backstamps consistent with Kentville and Wolfville — the letter’s route down the Windsor & Annapolis Railway line to the college itself. An embossed floral seal decorates the back flap.

William A. MacKinlay, of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, is listed among Acadia College's Junior class in 1866. Acadia’s 1888 general catalogue of graduates confirms he went on to graduate with the Class of 1868, recorded there as “William A. D. MacKinlay.”

A short life

William A. D. MacKinlay was born about 1846 on Prince Edward Island, son of Alexander MacKinlay (c. 1818–1888), a farmer at North River, Queens County, and Christiana Dockendorff (1809–1885), married June 12, 1845, with siblings Charlotte Jane (b. 1848), Daniel Chipman (b. 1852), and Mary Ellen. He was about 20 when this letter reached him at Acadia in December 1866, midway through his junior year.

After graduating in 1868, Acadia’s alumni catalogue records that he traveled to Minnesota and Colorado “in search of health” — very likely seeking a change of climate for tuberculosis or a similar illness, a common recourse in the era before effective treatment existed. The catalogue gives his place of death as Bridgetown, Nova Scotia, on November 11, 1879, at age 33; genealogical and cemetery records instead give his burial place as Cornwall United Church Cemetery, Cornwall, Queens County, Prince Edward Island — the same cemetery where his father, Alexander, a North River farmer, was himself buried in 1888. The two death and burial locations aren’t necessarily in conflict — a man who had been traveling for his health could easily have died away from home and been returned to Prince Edward Island for burial in his family’s own plot.

The course of study

Acadia’s curriculum in this period followed the standard classical liberal-arts pattern of the day, prescribed and identical for every student in a class — there were no electives. Candidates for matriculation had to be examined in arithmetic, English grammar, geography, English, and Grecian and Roman history, in algebra through the first six books of Davies’ Bourdon, and had to be “thoroughly acquainted with the Latin and Greek Grammars,” able to translate and parse two books of Caesar, two of Virgil’s Aeneid, two orations of Cicero, and two books of Xenophon’s Anabasis — no candidate was admitted before completing his fifteenth year.

By 1866–67, MacKinlay was in his Junior year, the third of Acadia’s four undergraduate classes, and the college’s own printed Course of Instruction for that year survives, term by term. In the first term he studied selected satires of Juvenal and Persius in Latin, Demosthenes’ De Corona in Greek, surveying and navigation, and Natural Theology and the Evidences of Christianity. The second term brought Plautus’s Captivi, Aeschylus’s Prometheus Vinctus, mechanics, and logic; the third, Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, Plato’s Phaedo, astronomy, and the completion of logic — alongside twice-weekly Latin and Greek composition and a monthly English essay throughout the year. Students aiming for honors took a still heavier load in the same term, adding Cicero’s De Senectute, Lucretius, Aeschines, Sophocles’ Ajax, Aristophanes’ Clouds, differential calculus, Paley’s Natural Theology and Horae Paulinae, Butler’s Analogy, and the logic of Mill and Sir William Hamilton.

This Junior course sat within a four-year sequence that opened, as a Freshman, with Livy and Xenophon, geometry and modern history, and closed, as a Senior, with Tacitus and Plato’s Gorgias, chemistry, and a full year of intellectual and moral philosophy — Wayland, Sir William Hamilton, Dugald Stewart. Students bound for the ministry could also enter Acadia’s Department of Theology, whose six-part course of instruction embraced Hebrew language and literature, biblical criticism, theology “in its various branches,” ecclesiastical history “with special regard to… the rise and progress of the Baptist Denomination,” pastoral duties, and sermon composition — though nothing in the record suggests MacKinlay himself pursued this track.

Discipline was correspondingly strict and closely documented. Every recitation was scored by the professors on a scale of ten, with an unexplained deficiency marked as a “demerit”; unexcused absence from morning or evening prayer likewise incurred demerits, and a student whose term total reached 50 saw a formal report sent to his parent or guardian, while 100 demerits meant expulsion. At the close of each term, students were ranked into two classes by their average recitation score, with a full report of scholarship and prayer attendance sent home to parents and to whoever held the student’s scholarship. No student could be absent from the college overnight during term without the President’s leave, and the use of intoxicating liquors or gunpowder on the premises was absolutely prohibited. Board at the Academy Boarding House ran 12s. 6d. a week, with tuition of £6 a year for students not holding a scholarship — the college’s library and a “commodious Cabinet” of geological and mineralogical specimens, drawing in particular on Nova Scotia’s own deposits, stood open to students alongside their coursework.

The College’s academic year ran in three terms: the first from September 1 to December 20, the second from January 6 to March 24, and the third from March 28 to June 6, with vacations bridging each gap. It was against this exacting, closely-watched daily record — ten classical authors, three sciences, and twice-weekly composition exercises, all logged and reported home each term — that this letter reached MacKinlay on December 13, 1866, just a week before the close of his Junior year’s first term and the start of the Christmas vacation.

Acadia College in 1866

Acadia had a short history behind it by the time this letter was sent. What began as an extension of Horton Academy, founded by Nova Scotia Baptists in 1828, grew into Queen’s College in 1838 — a name the colonial government declined to approve, leading to the substitution of “Acadia,” after the region’s Acadian history, when the charter was finally granted in 1841. The college awarded its first degrees in 1843, and would not become Acadia University until 1891. In December 1866 its president was the Rev. John Mockett Cramp, serving his second term in that role; Artemas Wyman Sawyer, later to serve as president for 27 years, was not appointed until 1869. Rounding out MacKinlay’s own junior class that year were William Elder of Hantsport, John Macdonald of Uigg, P.E.I., Albert Coldwell of Horton, and seven others drawn from across Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island — a small, tightly-knit cohort typical of the young Baptist college in its first decades.