Nathaniel Eaton--First Headmaster of Harvard University

Nathaniel Eaton, mistakenly identified as John Harvard on a cigar box

 
Nathaniel Eaton (born 17 September 1609 − 11 May 1674) was the first Headmaster of Harvard,^[3] President designate,^[4][5] and builder of Harvard's first College, the Old College, in 1636.^[6][7] Nathaniel was also the uncle of Samuel Eaton (one of the seven founding members and signatories of the Harvard Corporation by charter in 1650). Wikipedia

Nathaniel Eaton, the Sadistic Puritan Who Made Harvard Disappear for a Year

Harvard University got off to a rough start in 1638, when Nathaniel Eaton and his wife led such a reign of terror the school closed down for a year.

There wasn’t much to close down. Harvard was little more than half of John Harvard’s library, a farmhouse and a one-acre cowyard in the middle of Cambridge cow country. Samuel Eliot Morison wrote the college smelled like a stockyard.

“The ammoniacal streams emanating from yarded cattle mingled not inappropriately with odors from Mistress Eaton’s cooking,” wrote Morison.

For the handful of Harvard students, it was hard to say which was worse: beatings from Nathaniel Eaton or dinner from his wife.

On Oct. 28, 1636, the Massachusetts Bay Colony Great and General Court ordered the establishment of a college to train ministers. Two years later, a minister named John Harvard died childless and left his library and half his property to the college. For that, the school took his name.

The school also took John Harvard's friend, Nathaniel Eaton. Eaton, a well-educated Puritan, who had just arrived in Massachusetts in 1637 at the age of 28 with his family. His older brother Theophilus Eaton moved on to Connecticut and started the colony of New Haven. Nathaniel Eaton stayed behind in Massachusetts because he had a job as ‘schoolmaster’ at Harvard.

Cotton Mather called him a rare scholar. Of his students, Mather said, ‘their Education truly was In the School of Tyrannus.”

One student said Eaton was “fitter to have been an officer in the inquisition, or master of an house of correction, than an instructer (sic) of Christian Youth.”

But it was Mrs. Eaton whose cooking got him fired.

The magistrates dismissed Nathaniel Eaton, and Harvard shut down for the 1639-40 academic year.

The students went home, or studied with a tutor or had fun.  Only nine would graduate in 1642. Of those, three would return to Europe.

Nathaniel Eaton spent the rest of his life moving around the world, first to New Hampshire, then Virginia, then to Italy and England, where he died in debtor’s prison.   New England Historical Society