Monmouth College

Rev. David A. Wallace: First President of Monmouth College
Release Date: April 1, 1856

To lead the new institution, the board of trustees has selected a 30-year-old minister of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church in East Boston, Massachusetts. The Reverend David Alexander Wallace is well known to the College trustees through the family of his wife, Martha Findley Wallace, some of whom settled in Monmouth. But Wallace was equally attractive for his impressive academic record and his strong commitment to the ideals of Christian education.

Wallace was born in Fairview, Ohio, in 1826, the descendant of a long line of staunch Scotch-Irish Presbyterians. Exhibiting an early attraction to reading and study, he matriculated at Madison College in Antrim, Ohio, at the age of 12. After teaching school for several years as a teen-ager to support himself and his parents, Wallace entered the junior class of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in 1844. There he met Marion Morrison, who became his roommate and close friend. Wallace graduated in 1846 at the head of his class and, just a few months past the age of 20, moved on to become the president of Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio.

Following three years as Muskingum College's president, Wallace resigned to assume an administrative post in the public school system of Wheeling, West Virginia. His true calling became evident, however, as he began private study and courses in theology at the Associate Reformed Presbyterian seminaries at Oxford, Ohio, and Allegheny, Pennsylvania. In 1851,

Wallace was ordained by the Associate Reformed Presbytery of New York and assumed the pastorate of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church of Fall River, Massachusetts. In this ministry and in the one he subsequently assumed in 1854 at the Associate Reformed Mission Church in East Boston, Wallace developed into a persuasive preacher, skillful lecturer, and enthusiastic mission leader.

In choosing Wallace as its first president, Monmouth College finds not only an effective teacher but an inspiring leader who will give substance to the ambitious dreams of its founders. For Wallace, the presidency is particularly appealing because it fulfills a long-held personal ambition. While still a student at Miami University, he and his friend Marion Morrison had talked often of devoting themselves to establishing a college.

"Ten or 12 years before Monmouth College had an existence," Morrison recalls, "when we were classmates and roommates in college, we often built our air castles as to going west and building up a college, but Texas and not Monmouth was our contemplated point of operations." Now the Midwestern prairie, not the Texas plains, was to be the focus of their energies, and the two friends were reunited as academic colleagues in shaping a new educational institution.