MIDDLEBURY TOWNSHIP — ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again’ the old saying goes.
The Reverend Robert Stuart Morrison did, and that’s why today he is remembered as an important figure in the U.S. Presbyterian Church of the 1800s, and one who also made an impact on the world of education by establishing a well-known college fraternity that is still thriving today.
But success came slowly to the reverend.
Born in Greene County, Pennsylvania, in 1822, Morrison moved with his parents to the central Ohio frontier, settling near Mount Gilead in Morrow County. Interested in becoming a minister, he entered Ohio University to study. Unfortunately, his help was needed on the family farm and he was forced to drop out.
Determined to make a second attempt at college, he entered Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. During his senior year in 1848, he gathered a group of five other students and created the Phi Delta Theta fraternity. According to legend, they created the fraternity as a holiday project because the winter weather was severe that year and none of them dared risk traveling home for Christmas.
Morrison wrote the fraternity’s bond and designed their seal, both still in use today. Today the fraternity has 191 chapters throughout the U.S. and Canada, and has included such luminaries as Neil Armstrong, President Benjamin Harrison, Lou Gehrig, Frank Lloyd Wright, Burt Reynolds, and — from our own region — Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and conservationist Louis Bromfield.
The success of the fraternity was still far in the future, though, when Morrison graduated from Miami University. He had achieved an undergraduate degree — though not the coveted Doctor of Divinity degree — and immediately began working as a pastor, first in Tennessee, then later in Kentucky and Indiana.
None of these positions ever lasted terribly long, though.
He achieved some prominence as a newspaper editor in Louisville at the Louisville True Presbyterian during the Civil War, but the paper’s views were so controversial, the Union military shut them down in 1863. When the Presbyterian Church announced a plan to open a church in Waterford, in Middlebury Township in northwest Knox County in 1868 — near where Morrison grew up and several family members still lived, he volunteered.
Part of the project was to open a private school in Waterford. The Westminster Academy opened in September of 1869 with Robert Morrison as pastor of the church and his brother George Morrison as the principal of the school. It was a good-sized, L-shaped, two-story building, with a bell tower on the church end of the structure.
The building once sat on the south side of Waterford Road, approximately where the Waterford Church of Christ stands today, though a comparison with old maps suggests that the current church sits roughly where the school’s back yard was, as the school building was closer to the road than the current church.
A handsome engraving of the institution appeared in the 1871 Knox County Atlas, where the verbiage states that students could either live at the school or board with families in Waterford.
Judging by the fact that Morrison called it an “academy” and not a “college,” and also judging by some of the figures shown milling around in front of the school in the illustration, it would appear that Westminster was a private school for teenagers, making it an intermediate step between the common one-room schoolhouses and actual colleges.
The size of the building suggests that at the very least, the instution could serve several to a few dozen students, and very possibly more.
In his early years in Waterford, Morrison lived with William and Mariam Killen. William was a retired dry good merchant who had immigrated to the U.S. from Ireland.
But in 1873, Morrison — already over 50 years of age — finally got married, to a 20-year old named Flora Jane Bomberger, the daughter of Rev. Christopher Columbus Bomberger, another pastor participating in the mission. The Morrisons soon started having children, but their project in Waterford was about to end.
There had been a flurry of private schools started in the aftermath of the Civil War, as the American populace became more committed to the idea of education as a path to social mobility. As that idea grew more widespread, however, it led to tax reforms to allow for the creation of better public schools.
As the public schools improved and extended to higher grades, the enthusiasm for private schools waned. Enrollment at the Westminster dropped until it became no longer tenable. In 1875, the school closed its doors.
Morrison sought reassignment from the Presbyterian Church, and moved with his new family to Fulton, Missouri, where he founded several churches and continued to work as a minister the rest of his days. He was also prominently involved in the national Presbyterian Church organization.
As a mark of respect for his distinguished career, Miami University conferred an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree on Morrison in 1897, just five years before his death.
What became of his academy building in Waterford?
Though there is not a close-up map of Waterford in the 1896 Knox County Atlas, the Middlebury Township map does show detail in the village down to the lots, and there is no longer a lot with a long, L-shaped building. One can presume it was either dismantled for use of the wood, or else the abandoned building burned down.
Today, driving through Waterford, one would never guess that a large school building once stood there, hoping to launch students into the world of higher education.
