Erastus Test, the sixth of seven sons of Samuel and Hannah (Jones) Test, was born November 12, 1836, in a pioneer home, at that time half log and half frame, adjacent to the family woolen mill about a mile and a half south of the center of Richmond. His father, Samuel, Jr., was of the fifth generation of descent from the first John Test (born 1651). His grandfather Samuel (born 1774) was a grandson of this John Test's son Daniel.[10]
Grandfather Samuel Test was a maker of beaver hats in Salem, New Jersey, and it was he who in 1805 disposed of his hat business, and with his family of wife and three children journeyed westward to a farm he had purchased near Cincinnati, Ohio. Learning after some years that his title was not clear, he moved across the Ohio River and built the first house of Covington, Kentucky.
But becoming much opposed to the practice of slavery existing there, he took advantage of an opportunity to purchase a small woolen mill on the east fork of the White Water River, south of Liberty, and moved his family there in 1816. In 1824, he decided to send his eldest son, a third Samuel, east to Philadelphia to study the most advanced methods of the woolen business.
So young Samuel Jr., and a neighbor youth built themselves a flat boat, filled it with an assortment of Indiana produce, and floated down the Whitewater to the Ohio, thence to the Mississippi, and so to New Orleans, where the flat boat and its contents were disposed of.
The neighbor drops out of the picture, but Samuel took ship for Philadelphia, where he spent a number of months in earnest study of woolen processing, obtaining employment at three different woolen mills. There is extant a letter written by him to his father on January 2, 1825, in which he recounts his latest experiences and his desire to return home, but that it would be further delayed by insufficient funds, "room, board and washing" having been more than he had calculated, averaging $2.25 a week.
He also expressed sympathetic regret at news of the death of a neighbor, one Morgan Jones, and hoped that members of "Friend Morgan's family" were well. The reason for this expression of sympathy became apparent a year later, when he married Hannah, the eldest daughter of the deceased Morgan. Incidentally, to show the changes since that time, they were married in a Friends' meeting house in the village of Smyrna, some three miles northeast of Richmond, of which there is no building left standing, except the meeting house, and that has been remodeled into a farm house, while the farmer's pigs are said to browse in what was the ancient cemetery.
After Samuel's wedding, he and his bride started housekeeping at the site of the woolen mill, and so continued until 1835, when another mill was purchased just south of Richmond, and thereafter the family were of the Richmond community.
The branch of the Jones family to which Hannah (Samuel's wife) belonged can be traced back only to the late years of 1700 (sic) when her father Morgan lived near Bedford, Pennsylvania, in the "Dunning's Creek Region," from where they emigrated westward in 1819, with ox teams dragging wagons through deep mud for days on end, and the going made worse by much rain, as graphically set forth in a diary kept by the young Hannah in which she also recounts the occasional following of false trails, one for a heart-breaking period of nearly a week.
The trip reputedly took about seven months, before they reached Springboro, Ohio, where they arrived, by family tradition, just as "First-Day Meeting" was letting out. Making use of the old-saying, "the better the day, the better the deed," the good Friends set to work, utilizing a pile of logs already prepared, erected a small but comfortable log house before nightfall! Data upon their removal to Smyrna is not at hand, nor the circumstances under which Samuel and Hannah became acquainted.
Some of the Jones descendants still reside in Indiana, but several of them removed to Iowa and Nebraska after the Civil War, one of them at least because of being expelled from the Society of Friends as punishment for having taken part in the conflict! One of the third generation, Professor Elmer E. Jones, has won distinction, after preparation at the University of Colorado and Columbia University, is heading the Department of Education at the University of Indiana, and later for several years at Northwestern University.
A desire to go farther in education than the elementary schools led two of the Test sons to continue their learning, an elder brother Zaccheus, making his way to Germany, where he spent some years studying various systems of philosophy, but instead of going on along such lines, he put to use the knowledge of the German language he had acquired, and for many years headed the instruction of German in the Richmond schools.
Erastus, the other brother to pursue advanced studies, obtained money to finance his education by teaching, beginning in a country school at Dunlapsville when he was 19, and continuing as necessary. He inclined more toward scientific matters, and by work at Earlham College, supplemented by special classes at the University of Michigan, after his graduation from Earlham in 1863, the second year after it became a College, was given the chair of science at Earlham, the course consisting chiefly of instruction in chemistry, together with a side course in botany, in which he was much interested, although mainly self-taught.
He was also interested in mathematics and as a matter of "mental exercise," in his senior year at Earlham, calculated the risings and settings of the sun and moon, together with the times of their eclipses, for the ensuing year.
He continued in the chair of science at Earlham until 1872, twice taking six months of absence for additional postgraduate work in organic chemistry at the University of Michigan, by dint of hard work acquiring the degree of Doctor of Medicine at the same time. In case that should seem to reflect on the thoroughness of the teaching, it is to be borne in mind that at that time Michigan ranked first among medical schools west of the Alleghenies.
In 1868, he was married to Mary Taylor whose parents Joseph N. and Phoebe Taylor, had been superintendent and matron at Earlham in the middle 1860's. In those days, all meals were served in the basement of the one building, now "Old Earlham," and the girls took turns carrying the platters of food to the various long tables, each presided over by one of the instructors.
Noting a new girl, slender, graceful, and with snappy black eyes, bustling in with a tray and looking neither to right nor left, "Teacher Erastus" asked one of the other young men, "Who is that new girl?" The response came after a casual glance. "Oh I think she is a sister of Ed Taylor. Why?" and Erastus replied earnestly, "That is the girl I am going to marry." And he lived down the inevitable chaffing, and eventually did so.
Soon after the publication of Charles Darwin's book, "The Origin of Species," Erastus became much interested in the subject and studied it intensely, preparing and delivering lectures on the new theory of "Evolution," quite scandalizing various of the orthodox, although his obvious earnestness saved him from being ousted from his College position.
A few years later, when twin boys were added to his family, his interest in those in favor of evolution and in those opposed, led him to name one small son Charles Darwin and the other Louis Agassiz, after the Swiss-born geologist, who was emphatically against Darwinianism, even though many of his published findings had influenced Darwin in his theorizing. And, oddly enough, both boys grew up to be scientists, although chemists instead of biologists.
In 1872, one of Erastus Test's classmates in medicine at the University of Michigan in the late 60's, one Dr. Edmund F. Cleveland, whose surname he had used as a middle name for his first-born-son, wrote him from the village of Dundee, Illinois, a few miles from Elgin, begging him to resign his teaching position and enter into a partnership for practicing medicine, urging the greater financial returns.
After thinking it over, Erastus finally did resign his position at Earlham, took six months of what now would be called a "refresher course" at Indianapolis, and joined his friend Cleveland at Dundee, where the work was indeed more lucrative, in a marked degree, but proved to be a nervous strain as well.
Finally in 1875, after sundry nightmares that on more than one occasion made him rise from a sleepless bed in the early hours of morning, and drive some miles into the country, only to find the patient over whom he had grown anxious, not only improved but startled at the midnight call by his doctor, Erastus decided to resume teaching, in which his heart had been all the time.
To overcome the physical and mental fatigue of two and a half years hard work, he planned to spend a year recuperating in northwestern Oregon, where both he and his wife, had friends of their more youthful days, at the time engaged in carrying out agriculture, in the fertile soil of the Willamette Valley. The trip westward over the newly opened Union Pacific railroad and its terminal the Central Pacific to San Francisco and thence by steamship to Portland, occupied nine days, and the fact that the household goods, shipped a month earlier, had not arrived, apparently jolted Erastus out of his mental fatigue, for after consultation with the old settler who had founded the village of Dayton to which they had come, hand bills announcing high school courses, were printed and before two weeks had gone by, some 20-odd farmer boys and girls, unable to carry on outdoor farm work during the Oregon rainy season, were under instruction in an unused second floor room of the village grade school.
The curriculum included algebra, beginning Latin, history, physical geography, philosophy, and an enthusiastic class of three in geology. Or, so he wrote to his parents-in-law, who were in great alarm lest another Indian uprising (that of the Modocs having taken place less than a year before) might engulf the locality! In those days, there were three kinds of "philosophy," "natural," now called physics, "mental," or psychology, and "moral" or ethics. We can safely assume that this course was in physics.
Three months of this served as an effective tonic, and he began looking around for something more permanent, soon being promised the position in charge of chemistry at the Willamette University of Salem, Oregon, for the next year. With the future thus taken care of, he set about studying the advantages of different parts of Oregon for agricultural settlers, at the behest of friends in Indiana, and sending reports to a Richmond paper, the Richmond Telegram, (January-August 1876) where they were published, perhaps adding to the Oregon population thereby. In the late spring, he visited the state geologist, a minister, by the way, and the two worked for several days in the identification of bones of fossil mammals collected in the John Day Valley, from rich fossil beds.
In July, he and his family joined three others in a two-week wagon trip across the Coast Range mountains to the Pacific coast, adjoining an Indian village where the inhabitants were old acquaintances of the leader of their party, who had been Indiana Commissioner.
Their ways of life proved to be most interesting, but when described to the relatives in Indiana added so much to their anxiety that when an unexpected call to be principal of a preparatory school in Southern Michigan came to Erastus, he decided to accept and resign the Willamette University position, and a trek back to the Midwest promptly ensued.
The new position was as head of the Raisin Valley seminary, a co-educational Quaker boarding school in the country four miles from Adrian, which had been established some dozen years earlier. There was a teaching staff of three, or sometimes four, besides the principal and the school drew day-pupils from the neighboring farms, as well as boarding scholars from adjacent southern Michigan and northern Indiana.
Instead of Saturday, Monday was brought into play for a school-free day, so that parents who so desired could call for their children after school hours Saturday, and bring them back Monday afternoon or evening, in readiness for classes on Tuesday. It was a genuine preparatory school, with classes from the lower grades to upper high school. The school buildings were surrounded by a farm, conducted by a caretaker, which supplied such vegetables and milk, eggs and so on, as were required. Other forms of food came from Adrian. A field large enough to accommodate a baseball diamond lay adjoining the large school building, and also sufficient to provide for the type of football then played.
Erastus remained here five years, leaving because of urgent calls to establish a school with similar curriculum (but not a boarding school), at Plainfield, Indiana. There the next two years, 1881 to 1883, were spent in creating the school known as the Central Academy which is still in existence, although the building put up during the first year of Erastus' management has been replaced by a larger one, which serves as a community high school.
In 1883, he was asked to assist in the founding of a private school for the training of teachers, in Richmond, and to be known as the Richmond Normal School. The originator of the plan was Professor Cyrus Hodgin, later on the Earlham faculty. During the first year, 1883-84, the professor at Earlham in charge of chemistry and other science, Professor David W. Dennis, was away on a year's leave of absence for study, and once more Erastus conducted the chemistry at Earlham, in addition to giving high school instruction at the Normal school. After three years, the establishment of State Normal schools made the discontinuance of the Richmond Normal school advisable, and Erastus once more went into preparatory school work.
This time the school was the Union High School at Westfield, Indiana, which was a "going concern," but not very satisfactorily. He was fortunate enough to put enthusiasm into some new teachers as well as into pupils.
In the second year, the school was called to the attention of President Smart of Purdue University, which at that time was conducting a school covering the last year of high school work, where those lacking this work could make it up and go into university classes. In addition, there was a college dormitory for accommodating as many as two students from each county, who were given free tuition.
President Smart offered the position as head of the preparatory work, as well as director of the dormitory to Dr. Test, and after some hesitation he accepted, going to Purdue in the summer of 1888. After a few years, the preparatory school was suspended, and Dr. Test was asked in which department he would prefer to serve.
He felt that he was too many years away from teaching chemistry to resume that subject, but he recalled the pleasure he had always had in mathematics and suggested that. He was at once shifted to the Department of Mathematics, and continued until the time of his retirement from active teaching, although he continued tutoring until a year or so before his death in 1917.
In the later years of life, the student editors of the college yearbook put out a Doctor Test edition, calling him the "Grand Old Man of Purdue," a sobriquet of which he was tremendously proud, as indicating his position in the minds of his students, although he would constantly lecture them upon the subject of smoking, especially of cigarettes. He had page on page of statistics bearing out his views on its effect on scholarship as well as health.
He was an unusually well-read man, which may have played a part in his knack for clarity in his technique of instruction. Many times if he saw that pupils were having difficulty in grasping what he was offering, he would rephrase his statements, and often thereby set matters out in a sufficiently different light to ensure better comprehension. He was a deeply religious man, and started the day with Bible readings at the breakfast table. By many, however, he would not be considered "orthodox," in his interpretations of various dogmas, which he viewed as unessentials. He did not force his ideas upon others regarding an individual's religious views as a personal privilege, unless used in objectionable manner. He used to say that religious fundamentals were crystallized in the Golden Rule.
Dr. Test died April 21, 1917, at the family home in West Lafayette following an illness of six months. He is buried in Earlham cemetery.
More information about Richmond and the seven sons of Samuel Test, Jr. is given in these letters from Erastus to his old friend and teacher - John C. Skinner.
>> Letters from Erastus Test