Stephen Olin

Stephen Olin
President of Wesleyan University
In office 1839–1841
Preceded by	Willbur Fisk
Succeeded by	Nathan Bangs
3rd President of Wesleyan University
In office 1842–1851
Preceded by	Nathan Bangs
Succeeded by	Augustus W. Smith
Personal details
Born	March 2, 1797 Leicester, Vermont
Died	August 15, 1851 (aged 54) Middletown, Connecticut

Stephen Olin (March 2, 1797 – August 15, 1851) was an American educator and minister. He graduated Middlebury College in 1820 and was ordained into the Methodist Episcopal Church while teaching at the Tabernacle Academy in South Carolina and served a pastorate in Charleston. He became professor of belle-lettres at the University of Georgia in 1827. He was the first President of Randolph Macon College (1834–1837) and later was president of Wesleyan University (1839–1851).

In 1844, at the general conference of the Methodists, Olin called on his friend, Bishop James Andrew, to resign his office, on the grounds the latter owned slaves. Olin himself was criticized because his first wife (Mary E. Bostwick, whom he married in 1827) had owned slaves.

Publications

Travels in Egypt, Arabia Petræa, and the Holy Land 1844 Harper, New York.
Early piety, the basis of elevated character: a discourse to the graduating class of Wesleyan University 1851 Lane & Scott.
The Works of Stephen Olin (1852) and Greece and the Golden Horn (1854) were edited by his second wife, Julia Matilda Olin, and published posthumously.
College Life: Its Theory and Practice 1867, Harper, New York.

The Bronx, New York neighborhood of Olinville, began as two towns named for him (founded in 1852).

References

Appleton's Cyclopaedia of American Biography (James Grant Wilson & John Fisk, eds.) New York, Appleton, 1888.
The History of Methodism in Georgia and Florida: From 1785 to 1865 George Gilman Smith 1877 J. W. Burke & Co.,