Harvard Customs from a 1730 Grad's Scrapbook
Comfort Carpenter Listed College’s Customs in Colonial Era
Jul 26, 2008
Comfort Carpenter belonged to that very small percentage of Colonial era people who had a chance to get well educated. In his day there were no public schools as we know them and the majority of people could neither read nor write.
Comfort titled his remarks “Customs” and outlined them as follows:
- No freshman shall wear his hat in the College yard, except it rains, snows, hails, or he is on horseback, or has both hands full, or the like.
- No freshman shall talk saucily to his senior, or speak to him with his hat on; but if he be a graduate, “Sir” must be put before his name; if an undergraduate, “Sir” after his name.
- No freshman shall laugh in his senior’s face.
- No freshman shall ask his senior an impertinent question. No freshman shall intrude into his senior’s company.
- No freshman shall wear his hat in his senior’s chamber.
- Freshmen may wear their hat on at dinner time, except when they receive commons of Bread and Beer.
Harvard Already in Its Second Century
When Comfort graduated from Harvard in 1730 the college was then more than 100 years old, being the oldest institution of higher learning in America. It later graduated seven U.S. presidents and more than 40 Nobel laureates.
The same year he graduated, Comfort Carpenter married Huldah Bowen. He died at a very young age in 1739, leaving her with five small children, Chloe, Cynthia, Cyril, Orinda and Comfort, who moved to what is now Maine.
Little Known About Comfort Carpenter
Little is known of the nine years of Comfort’s life after he graduated from Harvard. Descendants have claimed he was a militia captain, a lawyer and a merchant. One tradition states he was killed by Indians at Charlestown, NH, but his gravestone is in Rehoboth,
His son Cyril, a lawyer and physician, lived almost three times as long as his father, dying in Voluntown, CT in 1816.
Scrapbook Cover Names Son
Comfort’s scrapbook has on its cover what is known as the “greyhound arms” of the Carpenter family and, written in Latin, the name of his son, Cyril. Some family researchers have speculated that Cyril, too, attended Harvard and took his father’s scrapbook with him.
Sources: Records which were in the private Carpenter manuscript collection of Admiral Charles Carpenter of Drexel Hill, PA in the 1970s, and an article titled Comfort Carpenter’s Scrapbook Gives Harvard Customs, which appeared in Vol. 4, No.2 (August, 1977) of a genealogy magazine, The Epistle, published in Machias, ME.
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