Dr. Nathaniel Tuckerman True

Educator, Historian, Editor and Community Leader

      At the time the event did not seem particularly auspicious. Nathaniel T. True came to Bethel from Pownal in 1835 to teach at the new Bethel High School. He was 23 years old and was also a college student when not in Bethel.  The school ran two terms a year: spring and fall.  According to William Lapham, True taught several terms then left Bethel. He was a popular teacher.

 

      After completing college, studying medicine, discovering doctoring and he did not fit well, being principal of Monmouth Academy and finding himself as a teacher, he returned to Bethel in 1847.  By then Bethel High School had become Gould’s Academy in Bethel.  Resuming teaching but more important, becoming principal of the academy, now Dr., True started down a road that would qualify him as one of the most significant personalities to ever reside in Bethel.

 

      His second employment at Bethel’s high school won high praise because.  His influence, expertise and professionalism attracted students adding luster to the school’s reputation. 

 

      Dr. True became a Bethel resident.  He was Bethel’s first historian.  Much of what Lapham has included in his “History of Bethel, Maine”  he owes to True.  True collected oral history.  This he passed on in a history column of  The Bethel Courier; he later became the paper’s editor.

 

      For historians, one of his most valuable contributions is his 1874 Bethel Centennial address (printed in Lapham’s book); it contains the history of Bethel’s founding as Sudbury Canada.  (See page 297, “History of Bethel, Maine”, William Lapham, re-printed by The Bethel Historical Society.  For more details about Dr. True, see page 144 in the same book.)

 

      True’s scientific interests broadened his field of contacts: especially applying science to farming . Besides that he was a community leader in education both in town, county and state.

 

      His daughter, Susie Marian, by a second wife, later married Dr. John George Gehring. It is this woman’s  devotion to her father, her father’s and therefore her personally vested interest in the success of Gould Academy, as well as her influence with patients of her husband’s clinic and William Bingham II that gave this school the foundation it needed to survive the cut-throat years of the Maine academy era.  Gould prospered gloriously while others were less fortunate.

 

On May 17, 1887, Dr. True died at his home in Bethel.

 

      Today’s academic and trustee personalities of Gould Academy name their most esteemed, prestigious award for educational excellence the Dr. Nathaniel Tuckerman True Award.          

 

 

 

 

     

Nathaniel Tuckerman True

1812 to 1887

 

Pencil drawing by the author is based on the photograph of Dr. True that is printed in William Lapham’s History of Bethel, Maine.

 

People Who Shaped Bethel

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