Marking the 200th Anniversary of the Class of 1825
By Kat StefkoOn Wednesday, September 7, 1825, Bowdoin College held its twentieth commencement, graduating its "most famous class," that of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne. A new online exhibition marks this 200th anniversary and recreates the Library's Spring 2025 exhibition "Before They Were Famous: The Student Days of the Class of 1825."
With assistance from Bowdoin's Information Technology, the Library has launched Omeka-S to host its online exhibitions. This next-generation web publishing tool is designed specifically for sharing digital cultural heritage collections. The online version of "Before They Were Famous" allows remote visitors to virtually walk through the exhibition; like its physical counterpart, the site is organized by thematic exhibition cases that explore how students learned, lived, and recreated.
Among the many objects to explore are those related to the Class of 1825's commencement, then a three-day affair that drew a considerable crowd of local residents as well as families and friends. The graduating seniors raised $300 (approximately $10,000 in today's dollars) to hire musicians from Boston to entertain visitors. The highest ranking students gave speeches or engaged in disputations in Latin. Among the orators was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow who made a last-minute and prescient decision to change his topic from "The Life and Writings of Chatterton," as printed on the program, to “Our Native Writers,” an area in which he would soon make considerable contributions.
A tinge of sadness also accompanied the ceremonies. Gorham Deane, who was to graduate second in the class died on August 11, 1825, just three weeks prior to commencement. The College held his place in the Commencement program--he was to give the philosophical disputation immediately before Joshua Stover Little's valedictory oration--and was granted a degree posthumously.
While each member of the Class of 1825 would soon go their own way--eventually spreading out over the entire expanse of their relatively young country--the friendships they formed at Bowdoin would prove seminal. As explored in the exhibition, the lives of the surviving 36 graduates of the Class of 1825 continued to overlap. They supported each other professionally and personally. In all likelihood the name of Nathaniel Hawthorne would largely be lost from history if it were not for the emotional and financial support of his Bowdoin classmate Horatio Bridge.
To learn more about this and other stories about the Class of 1825, we invite you to visit "Before They Were Famous."