Clark T. Hinman
Clark Titus Hinman (August 3, 1819 – October 21, 1854) was an American educator and Methodist minister. He was the first president of Northwestern University and the second president of Albion College.
Hinman was born in Kortright, New York. He joined the Methodist Episcopal Church at age ten and studied at Cazenovia Seminary. He became a licensed minister at nineteen and graduated from Wesleyan University in 1839, where he helped found the Eclectic Society.
He taught Greek and mathematics at Newbury Seminary in Newbury, Vermont, starting in 1839 and served as its principal from 1844 to 1846. In 1846, he moved to Albion, Michigan to head the Wesleyan Seminary there, which later became Albion College. He taught Belles-lettres and moral and intellectual science and served as its president from 1846 to 1853. He also helped admit female students and edited the Newbury Biblical Magazine.
Hinman joined the Northwestern University board of trustees in 1851 and was unanimously elected its first president on August 23, 1853. He planned the campus, raised funds, organized an endowment, and helped set up a preparatory school, but he died before the university opened for classes.
He received a Doctor of Divinity from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1851. Northwestern’s Hinman Literary Society was named in his honor, as was Hinman House and Hinman Avenue in Evanston, Illinois.
Hinman married Martha A. Morse Hinman, who taught piano at Newbury Seminary, and they had three children. He fell ill in October 1854 while traveling to Vermont to recover and died in Troy, New York, of typhoid fever and dysentery at age 35. He is buried in Oxbow Cemetery in Newbury, Vermont.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 18:35 (CET).