Jesse Appleton

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Jesse Appleton (November 17, 1772 - Nov. 12, 1819) was the second president of Bowdoin College and the father of First Lady Jane Pierce.

[edit] Life and Career

After having graduated from Dartmouth College in 1792, Appleton taught at several institutions including Amherst College and then worked at a parish in Hampton, New Hampshire. In the early 1800s, he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity from both Dartmouth and Harvard University. In 1807, he was appointed president of Bowdoin, where he remained until he died of tuberculosis in 1819. A congregationalist minister and prominent Christian lecturer, Appleton was notably determined to make Bowdoin students more pious. He worked at the school, right before it reached its full prominence in the 1820s, when Nathaniel Hawethorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Franklin Pierce attended.

He was the father of five children who survived through infancy, including Jane who would become First Lady to President Pierce and Frances who would marry famed Bowdoin professor Alpheus Spring Packard. In 1837, Packard went on to edit The Works of Rev. Jesse Appleton, D.D., with a Memoir of His Life and Character.