Oren Cheney Founded West Lebanon Academy, Became President of Bates College

Oren Cheney was born in Holderness, NH to Abigail and Moses Cheney who were prominent abolitionists. Cheney's father was a paper manufacturer and also a conductor on the Underground Railroad.
Influenced particularly by his mother, Cheney developed core beliefs in the causes of abolitionism and temperance. He supported these causes throughout his life as an abolitionist, teacher, Freewill Baptist minister, state legislator, editor of "The Morning Star", an abolitionist paper.
Cheney's father, Moses, was the original printer for The Morning Star newspaper, and he was a friend of Frederick Douglass, the noted abolitionist. The first issue of The Morning Star was published in Limerick, Maine on 11 May 1826. Seven years later the newspaper relocated to Dover, NH and it continued to be published in that town from November 1833 until December 1874. Thereafter it was published in various cities including Portland, Boston and Chicago until its final issue rolled off the presses in 1911.
Young Cheney was educated at the Parsonfield Seminary, (a Free Will Baptist prep school). He attended college at Brown University, and Dartmouth College, where he graduated with the Class of 1839. Cheney had transferred from Brown to Dartmouth after seeing mob violence on campus against abolitionists. The college had many economic ties with slave trade shipping. Cheney believed that Dartmouth was more tolerant of abolitionism.
In 1840 he married Caroline A. Rundlett and they had one child, Horace Rundlett Cheney. Caroline died in 1846, while he was studying at Whitestown.
In 1844 Cheney was ordained as a Free Will Baptist minister. He later attended the Free Will Baptist Bible School in Whitestown, NY to study theology but had to leave following his wife's death in 1846. (This school was later called the Cobb Divinity School).
In 1847, the widower Cheney married Nancy S. Perkins. They had two children, Caroline and Emmeline. Nancy died in 1886.
Oren Cheney was the principal at Parsonfield Divinity, a stop on the Underground Railroad, for several years in the 1840s. He founded the Lebanon Academy on Jim Grant Road in West Lebanon, Maine in 1848.
In 1851 Cheney was elected to the Maine House of Representatives as a Free Soil Party candidate, and was a strong supporter of the Maine State Law in favor of prohibition.
In 1855, Cheney founded the Maine State Seminary, the school that would later become Bates College. He served as president until 1894. The school reflected his personal values: it was open to all students regardless of race, gender, wealth or religion
In 1863, Cheney petitioned the Maine Legislature for a change in the charter to permit a collegiate course of study. He changed the school's name to Bates College in honor of Benjamin E. Bates, the industrialist and philanthropist who made substantial early gifts to Cheney's school.
Cheney had a major hand in founding other schools in the State of Maine, such as the Maine Central Institute (MCI), founded in 1866, and he also helped to form Storer College, a school for freed slaves in West Virginia founded in 1867
The Cheney House, on the campus of Bates College, was built in 1875 when Cheney was president.
In 1892 Cheney married for a final time to Emeline S. (Aldrich) Burlingame, a widow, who survived him.
Cheney served as Bates' president for 39 years, retiring at age 79 in 1894.
Cheney died in 1903 and was buried in Riverside Cemetery in Lewiston, Maine.
The Cheney House was acquired in 1905 by Bates College. Today it is used as a dormitory, a "quiet house" for 32 students.