When did the Davidson Endowment start?
Answer
From the Trustee minutes, it looks like Davidson College has had an endowment fund since 1844. The interest from those funds was used to pay faculty salaries. In 1851, a campaign was begun to expand the endowment and in 1856 we got the Maxwell Chambers money. After the Civil War most of the investments were lost but the college still kept some railroad bond as part of the endowment.
Both Cornelia Shaw’s book on Davidson’s history, and Mary Beaty’s history of the college reference the beginning of the endowment. Miss Shaw references a date of 1838, and Mary Beaty, 1836. However, Mary also comments that the date is hard to pinpoint.
Davidson's earliest endowment or "permanent fund" grew out of a need
to endow at least one of the college's two professorships. If there could be
enough income from an endowed professorship to pay the president's salary,
it was reasoned, tuition could pay the salaries of the other faculty member and
the tutor. Fund raising for this first professorship appears to have begun by
1836. Some qualifier must, unfortunately, accompany any account of these
endowments for professorships. No subject in the early history of the college
is more difficult to sort out and make sense of, though not for lack of material.
Fund raising occupied the trustees and presbyteries practically to the exclusion
of all else during the late 1830s and 1840s, but what emerges is a confused
picture of several simultaneous drives. What can be said with fair certainty is
that Concord Presbytery was to be responsible for a campaign to raise at least
$20,000 to endow the president's salary, and had raised $16,200 by 1846. A
second drive, undertaken in 1838, was to be the responsibility of Bethel
Presbytery and is possibly to be identified with the so-called "South Carolina
Professorship." This second endowment reached $u,300 by 1846.