Alvan E. Bovay

Founder

Alvan Earle Bovay was a founder of both Ripon College in 1851 and the newly established Republican Party in 1854.

He was born July 12, 1818, in Adams, Jefferson County, New York, where David Mapes also was living at the time, although it is not known if they knew each other there. Bovay graduated from Norwich University in Vermont in 1841 and taught in New York City.

The New York Tribune had published letters by Warren Chase describing the Ceresco commune and the “perfect western paradise” in Wisconsin, prompting Bovay to move to Ripon in October 1850. The Wisconsin Phalanx community in this location was breaking up, and he purchased “Bovay’s Addition” on former Phalanx land just south of what is now the College campus.

“As one of the town’s first lawyers, Bovay played an important role in Ripon’s growth into a city,” it is reported in “Ripon College A History.” “As a political reformer with strong Whig Party connections in the East, he took a leading part in the famous 1854 meeting in the Little White School House … where the new Republican Party was formed.”

The surviving records of the Lyceum, the first plan for the College, and the early years of the College are in Bovay’s hand. He was involved with the legal structure of organizing the Lyceum; helped stake out the first building of the College in a snowstorm in April 1851 with David P. Mapes; and served as a director, Trustee and faculty member.

Bovay was a Republican member of the Wisconsin State Assembly in 1859-1860. During the Civil War, he served as a major with the 19th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment. He then returned to Ripon until the late 1880s. He later moved back to New York and eventually settled in California.

He died Jan. 13, 1903, at the age of 84.