American educator, born at Windham, CT, on the 22nd of April 1711; graduated at Yale College (1733); ordained pastor of the Second Congregational Church at Lebanon, CT, March 1735, where he continued for thirty-five years. He had as a pupil, during some of these years, a Mohican Indian boy, Samson Occom, whose aptitude led him to the plan of an Indian school, and by 1762 he had upward of twenty Indian youths under his charge. Joshua Moor, a Mansfield farmer, gave them a house and two acres of land in Lebanon, and the institution took the name of Moor’s Indian Charity School. Out of this school, through the efforts of Occom and Wheelock and others in obtaining subscriptions and concessions of land, Dartmouth College grew, and was named for the Earl of Dartmouth, the first trustee of the funds. Mr. Wheelock was named as founder and the first president of the college, although the college and the Indian school remained nominally separate until 1849.
His son, John, educator, born at Lebanon, CT, on the 28th of January 1754; entered Yale College (1767); went to Hanover, NH, with his father in 1770, and graduated with the first class from Dartmouth College in 1771; was tutor there until 1774; served in the army of the Revolution, and was a member of General Gates’s staff. He succeeded his father as president of Dartmouth when twenty-five years of age, and was given the chair of civil and ecclesiastical history in 1782. In 1783 he was shipwrecked off Cape Cod while returning from England, where he had been endeavoring to raise money for the college, and all his money and personal effects were lost. He died at Hanover, NH, on the 4th of April 1817.
