Presidents of Georgetown College

Rockwood Giddings   1838-1839

            Georgetown College was on the verge of closing when the trustees of the Kentucky Baptist Education Society called Rev. Rockwood Giddings to succeed Farnsworth.  Under his leadership, the cornerstone was firmly placed for the college’s future success.

            Like Farnsworth, Giddings was a New England native, born in Compton, New Hampshire on August 8, 1812.  After earning a degree from Waterville College, (now Colby College), in Maine, in 1833, he was licensed to preach by the Baptist church in Waterville.  He studied medicine in Virginia and Warsaw, Kentucky.  Then, in 1835, Giddings was ordained as a Baptist minister, and started preaching at the Baptist church in Shelbyville, Kentucky.  In just a short time, he had assumed a leading role among Kentucky Baptists.  He became well known for his revival preaching.  His stature had risen to the point that he was elected as Georgetown College’s fourth president at the age of twenty-seven.  Farnsworth, who taught Giddings at the New Hampton Institute, recommended Giddings.

            Giddings hesitated before accepting the position, because he knew it would deny him his first love, which was preaching.  Opposing the Baptist Reformers led by Alexander Campbell, Giddings finally agreed to be president on the condition that all trustees who opposed him on theological grounds would resign.  In 1838, Georgetown College had a few students, two teachers, a small amount of money, and one wooden building, which once housed the Rittenhouse Academy.  During the succeeding eight months after assuming the presidency, Giddings raised $80,000 by speaking to Baptist congregations and other groups in about one-third of Kentucky’s counties.  There were about 42,000 Baptists in Kentucky at the time.  But tragedy struck on October 13, 1839.  Giddings collapsed after eight days of preaching.  The twenty-seven-year-old president died of exhaustion on October 29.

            Giddings’s legacy has reverberated to the present.  The Rev. Ryland T. Dillard, delivering a funeral oration on Giddings in January 1840, summed it up when he said, “tho’ dead, he yet speaketh.”  In their meeting following Giddings’s death, the trustees ordered the erection of a monument in his memory on the college’s campus, and in 1908, Georgetown College’s first permanent building, which was started while he still lived, was given his name.

Please direct inquiries to Dr. Glen Taul