and associate justices; 7 Emmy Award winners; 5 Pulitzer Prize winners; 2 U.S. Cabinet-ranked officials; and numerous CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. The Bates athletic program has graduated 12 Olympians and 209 All-Americans and maintains 32 varsity sports, some of which compete in Division I of the NCAA. The college is home to the Bates Dance Festival, the Mount David Summit, the Stephens Observatory, and the Bates College Museum of Art. History Origins While attending (and later leading) the Freewill Baptist Parsonsfield Seminary, Bates founder, Oren Burbank Cheney worked for racial and gender equality, religious freedom, and temperance. In 1836, Cheney enrolled in Dartmouth College (after briefly attending Brown), due to Dartmouth's significant support of the abolitionist cause against slavery. After graduating, Cheney was ordained a Baptist minister and began to establish himself as an educational and religious scholar. Parsonsfield mysteriously burned down in 1854, allegedly due to arson by opponents of abolition. The event caused Cheney to advocate for the building of a new seminary in a more central part of Maine. With Cheney's influence in the state legislature, the Maine State Seminary was chartered in 1855 and implemented a liberal arts and theological curriculum, making the first coeducational college in New England. Soon after establishment several donors stepped forward to finance portions of the school, such as Seth Hathorn, who donated the first library and academic building, which was renamed Hathorn Hall. The Cobb Divinity School became affiliated with the college in 1866. Four years later in 1870, Bates sponsored a college preparatory school, called the Nichols Latin School. The college was affected by the financial panic of the later 1850s and required additional funding to remain operational. Cheney's impact in Maine was noted by Boston business magnate Benjamin Bates who developed an interest in the college. Bates gave $100,000 in personal donations and overall contributions valued at $250,000 to the college. The school was renamed Bates College in his honor in 1863 and was chartered to offer a liberal arts curriculum beyond its original theological focus. Two years later the college would graduate the first woman to receive a college degree in New England, Mary Mitchel. The college began instruction with a six-person faculty tasked with the teaching of moral philosophy and the classics. From its inception, Bates College served as an alternative to a more traditional and historically conservative Bowdoin College. There is a complex relationship