Eleazar Wheelock

Eleazar Wheelock was a Congregational minister in Connecticut who ran a charity school for Native American students before founding Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in 1769, the last of the nine colleges chartered in the colonies. The charter says the college was established for the education of youth of the Indian tribes, and also of English youth and any others.

The money came largely from his most successful pupil, Samson Occom, a Mohegan minister who went to England and raised more than 12,000 pounds by preaching. Occom later broke with Wheelock, because the college that grew from that money mostly educated the sons of white colonists, and Dartmouth itself now tells the story that way. The Dartmouth walk starts on the Green, by the Hanover Inn, where his college began in the forest.