In 1895, Oliver Decker brought his new bride to live in an apartment in the west wing of the College Building, as it was known then. He operated a bicycle shop on the premises, which was advertised in The College Echo, the yearbook. While his family lived there, his wife, assisted by a female physician (possibly Frances Carothers Blanchard), gave birth to a baby girl named Hazel.

Plans for a new Blanchard Memorial Building were made soon after the death of Charles Blanchard. It was later decided that funds raised for the project should be applied toward constructing the final (east) wing of the Main Building. Once completed it was named Blanchard Hall to honor both Jonathan and Charles Blanchard. The development of this building spanned nearly 75 years (1853-1927) and the administrations of three presidents.

The Senior Bench at Wheaton College is one of the oldest and most legendary rivalries in the school’s 150 year history. According to dusty archives files and whispers of oral tradition, the graduating class of 1912 is believed to have bequeathed a hefty concrete monument to solidify its place in the annals of her alma mater.

Anchored in front of Blanchard Hall and first photographed for the 1934 Tower yearbook, it was intended for seniors only, but through the decades envious undergraduates soon coveted it’s prized status. A great rivalry began in 1949 when juniors from the class of 1950 stole the top two foot by seven foot section while the seniors where away on their annual retreat.

Many ingenious, inventive, and sometimes illegal methods have been employed by rival classes in their passionate pursuit of securing this nearly 800-pound stone slab. During the 1950s an exact replica was cast by the class of 1957 in a fool hearty attempt to trick the other classes, yet to no avail. The class of 1959 is heralded for one of the most amazing bench showings as it suspended the bench from a helicopter and flew it over the Homecoming football game.

Another infamous bench caper was hatched when seniors from the class of 1963 traveled by train to Colorado for their yearly retreat. As the train stopped at Mendota, Illinois the bench was shown by the juniors who had arrived by car to taunt the seniors. A melee ensued and a scheduled thirty second stop erupted into a two hour delay as railroad agents, local police and the Interstate Commerce Commission were all summoned to sort out this violation of federal law.

The current rules surrounding possession of the bench were enacted after seniors from the class of 1966 showed the bench in chapel and were greeted by slashed tires and cut ignition wires in the parking lot. The bench was confiscated by the Dean of Students and mysteriously destroyed while under lock and key. A replica soon surfaced and the tradition was resurrected. Henceforth all bench activity has been limited to the junior and senior classes, the bench must remain within a fifteen-mile radius of Blanchard Hall, half of the bench must be visible at all times, and the bench must be shown twice a year and never in chapel.

In subsequent decades the passionate rivalry has ebbed and flowed as soil analysis kits, airplanes, wiretaps, high-speed car chases, Billy Graham, wishing wells, and even eBay, have all been employed in pursuit of this elusive prize for all Wheaton students.

In the waning days of 1858, Jonathan Blanchard, then president of Knox College, wrote home to his wife Mary. Among matters pertaining to the raising of the children, city taxes and sending a turkey to him, Jonathan broaches the topic of Christmas. According to Clyde Kilby’s account in Minority of One, “as long as he lived Jonathan Blanchard believed [Christmas] to be a pagan and Popish festival and [one he] would never recognize.” In his instructions back to the family Blanchard writes, “Maria would please me muchly by denying herself the Christmas frolic because it’s a fool’s day.” In this spirit of foolishness, we counter Jonathan’s ba-humbugs with the College Archives rendition of the “Twelve Days of Christmas.”

On the twelfth day of Christmas
my true love sent to me:
Twelve Trustees Minutes
Eleven Reels of Sports Film
Ten King James Bibles
Nine Centennial Towers
Eight Homecoming Pins
Seven President’s Papers
Six Miles of Shelving
Five Bits of Bench
Four Crusader T-shirts
Three Blanchard Wives
Two Auca Spears
and a Lock of Julia Blanchard’s Hair

The details of James Burr’s early life are little-unknown. It appears from the scant evidence that he was born in Cuba, New York, in 1814, but details of the subsequent twenty years trail off, until his enrollment at Oberlin College in 1834-35. He stayed a year and then was drawn away to The Mission Institute, also known as The Adelphia Theopolis Mission Institute, in Quincy, Illinois. The Institute was founded by Dr. David Nelson, a former Revolutionary War soldier and physician. Both Oberlin and The Institute were renowned for their open sympathies with the cause of abolition.

After a reconnaissance mission into Missouri to free those enslaved, on the night of July 12th, 1841 Burr returned with two classmates, George Thompson and Alanson Work, and the slave owners ambushed them during their rescue attempt. The men were bound by ropes and paraded off to Palmyra, Missouri. They were quickly indicted for stealing slaves, held without bail, and chained together for months until their trial was called. In 1841 Missouri had no law against encouraging slaves to flee north. In addition, the testimony of blacks could not be used in court as evidence against a white man. Technically the three had broken no law since no slave had run away. In addition, they had spoken only to slaves and there was no legally admissible evidence for the prosecution. Still, the men were tried in mid-September on an illogical combination of trumped-up charges and found guilty of grand larceny though they had stolen nothing. Outside the court, the town’s citizens prepared a gallows “in case they were acquitted.” Dubbed “The Quincy Abolitionists,” they each received 12 years at hard labor in the state penitentiary, and, still in chains, they left for Jefferson City. Years later George Thompson wrote his memoir Prison Life and Reflections from the prison journals and letters from all three men. Thompson vividly recalled their first night together in jail, “[we] knelt down, and committed ourselves to God, imploring His guidance and protection, feeling that He had wise purposes to accomplish by this unintelligible dispensation.” Denied paper for nearly two years, Thompson kept his journal on “bedstead, old boards, and blank leaves, by recording, sometimes a word, sometimes two or three words, and sometimes a sentence or two-just enough to bring the occurrence or scene to my mind-with the date.” Deprived of all but the thinnest of clothing and blankets, they almost froze during the first two winters.

Eventually James was permitted to refashion their two small beds into one so that all three could sleep together and “we could take turns getting into the middle. If an outside one was becoming frostbitten, he only had to request the middle one to exchange places awhile; and we were ever ready to oblige and accommodate for each knew how to sympathize with the other. So far from murmuring, we had great cause for thankfulness-for many were in a worse condition than we.” As “the cause” advanced, the health of all three declined, but Burr was most severely affected, and he was often unable to work for weeks at a time.

On January 19, 1844, James’s arm was caught in a machine, twisted and crushed in such a way that both bones in the wrist were broken with one protruding through the skin. The doctor “set it according to the best of his skill; which we feared at the time was not very good, as the result proved. He [James] bore the setting very well, scarcely uttering a groan-painful yet needful. As feared, his arm never healed properly, remaining useless for the remainder of his life. Burr was repeatedly ill and unemployed but this probably worked to his advantage. Inasmuch as he was of little value to the prison lessees, he was pardoned a year later. Freed quite suddenly in January 1846, he remembered feeling so stricken at the thought of leaving George alone that he offered to give his pardon to his Brother Thompson, but the authorities wouldn’t permit it. Burr returned to Quincy after his pardon, but moved about one hundred miles north to Princeton, Illinois, by 1849. The 1850 census reported him working as a carpenter and having a wife, Mary Anne Munroe, and two children: Charles H. and Mary A. Munroe who were 13 and 11 years of age respectively.

The Illinois Institute had been founded in 1853 by Wesleyan Methodists who had split from the main body of the Methodist Church over the question of slavery. Early in 1859, two months before his death from consumption, which he probably contracted while in prison, he prepared a will leaving $300 of his $4000 estate to the Illinois Institute in Wheaton. This money was “to be used for the educating of indigent fatherless young men who were wholly devoted to the cause of Christ wishing a preparation for such a calling and wishing to preach said gospel to all irrespective of color and who are opposed to slavery and sin of every grade and in favor of the reformers of the present day.” The question of how Burr’s grave came to campus remains an unsolved mystery. According to a brief letter in the Christian Cynosure of February 20, 1879, by George Thompson, Burr was buried there “by special request.” He wished his grave to be on grounds untrampled by slavery. There were many other ties between the tiny school and the city where Burr lived. In 1860 two of the trustees of the institution, Rufus Lumry and Owen Lovejoy, (another zealous abolitionist), list Princeton, Illinois, as their home address. In addition, John Cross, who taught in the school, was also from Princeton. Undoubtedly, Burr was well acquainted with the sympathies of these men and knew of their efforts to aid runaway slaves. Given tuition costs of $24 per year for the college by 1860, his legacy endowed a full scholarship. When forced to reorganize in 1859-60, the administration naturally looked for a man who felt as deeply as they did about the issue of abolition. Consequently, they invited Jonathan Blanchard to become the president of the struggling school and he arrived in January, 1860, almost a year after Burr’s burial. No one knows whether these two men were acquainted, but it is almost certain that they knew of each other and their joint sympathy for the abolitionist cause.

For years Burr rested quietly, his grave officially decorated once each year by students. Then the damage done by pranksters to the tombstone caused campus officials to remove the seven-foot high marker and replace it with one flush with the ground. In April of 1959, there was a special commemorative service in his memory, focusing attention on his life. Although speculation about Burr waxed and waned following that occasion, he didn’t return to prominence until 1987 when the new James E. Burr Scholarship for first-year minority students was announced.