Dr. Edward Dwight Eaton was born at Lancaster, Wisconsin, on January 12, 1851, the son of the Reverend and Mrs. Samuel W. Eaton. His father, a Yale graduate in 1842, was then pastor of a Congregational Church in Lancaster and later pastor of the Roscoe, Illinois, church for 17 years. Dr. Eaton attended the Lancaster schools.

As the years of Dr. Eaton’s life are reviewed, one is struck by their color and richness. At the close of the Civil War, as a boy of fourteen, he rode with his father through the streets of Washington in the “Grand Review” of the victorious army of the Potomac. The senior Eaton had left his church in Lancaster to serve as chaplain in the Seventh Wisconsin regiment.

The boy himself had seen brief service among the soldiers of General Grant’s army in connection with a so-called “Christian Mission,” but the fighting was over and now he shared in the triumph, greeted by throngs of civilians and by children with flowers. The long procession passed in front of the White House where sat President Johnson, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and General Grant. “We returned to camp that evening,” relates Dr. Eaton, “three hundred thousand of us. It may be that I was the youngest of all those reviewed that day.”

Three years later Edward Dwight Eaton arrived as a freshman at Beloit College and enrolled as a member of the class of 1872. Following his graduation with scholastic honors as valedictorian and with a Bachelor of Arts Degree, he went to Yale Divinity School, from which he graduated in 1875.

The same year, on August 23, he married Miss Martha E. Barber, member of a prominent western Wisconsin pioneer family. For several months he studied at Leipsig and Heidelberg Universities in Germany. From 1876 to 1879 Dr. Eaton was pastor of a Congregational Church at Newton, Iowa. In the latter year he was called to a pastorate of the large Oak Park, Illinois, Congregational Church where he remained until he became president of Beloit College in 1886.

He was president of the college for 19 years, until 1905, without interruption and then resigned to re-enter the active ministry. But two years later, in 1907, he was called back to the college as its president again. This time he served until 1917. In 1923 he returned to the campus to serve as interim president between the Brannon and Maurer administrations.

Dr. Eaton was pastor of a church at St. Johnsbury, Vermont, from 1905 to 1907 and of a Washington, D.C. church from 1918 to 1920. Meantime he was influential in the Congregational Church affairs and one of that denomination’s most influential figures.

In 1898 he was one of a board of three Americans sent to China for a detailed survey of American missions in the Far East. He was for several years secretary of the National Congregational Council and he was a director or trustee of many church, missionary and educational organizations and institutions.

He received many honorary degrees, including from Northwestern, Yale, University of Wisconsin, Marietta, Beloit and others. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, national honorary scholastic fraternity.

In February of 1938 Dr. Eaton returned to Beloit College to attend the dedication of the rebuilt student chapel named the Edward Dwight Eaton Chapel in his honor. He spoke at the dedicatory service. It was announced at that service that Dr. Eaton had given to the building the choir stalls as a memorial to Mrs. Eaton who had died a short time previously.

Dr. Eaton was a prolific writer upon educational and church subjects. He was a keen student and a national authority on hymnology. He edited several hymnals especially adapted to colleges and universities. His “Student Hymnary” was the official hymn book at Beloit College. He wrote much for Congregational journals. He also was the author of the volume entitled “Historical Sketches of Beloit College” and a biography of his parents “Two Wisconsin Pioneers.”

President and Mrs. Eaton had five children, two sons and three daughters. Only one of the sons had children; a granddaughter Ethelyn Read had a son, Eaton Van Wert Read, who was a 1929 Beloit College graduate.

Dr. Eaton enjoyed his retirement years in extremely good health. He died at his home in Fairfield, Connecticut, on June 19, 1942, at the age of 91.

To those who knew Dr. Eaton, the impression of his personality was single, unmistakable—he was a gentleman, a scholar, to be sure, a man of large and varied capacity, an administrator of skill; but before this and above this – a gentleman, in all that the word implies.