After attending a preparatory school near Yale, along with his brother James, Horace Bunch Gould of St. Simons Island started his freshman year at Yale in 1828. Horace planned, as a graduate of the class of 1832, to one day return home to St. Simons, where his father owned two cotton plantations and was keeper of the island’s first lighthouse.
Coastal Georgia Historical Society
Horace Bunch Gould
Unfortunately for Horace, however, he enrolled at Yale during a particularly turbulent period. During his first year at the university, in 1828, students launched what they called a “Bread and Butter Rebellion,” an extended and organized campaign against the perceived decline in food quality at the school’s central dining hall. Although these students brought their demands to Yale’s faculty, their campaign was ultimately unsuccessful. Several had gone on “strike” against the dining hall and dormitories by living and eating off campus, but they were eventually required to move back into Yale facilities or risk expulsion.
Members of Horace’s class would not be so lucky. In the decade before Horace started at Yale, the university had begun to implement a new feature in many classrooms: blackboards. Before the introduction of blackboards, students could refer to geometry diagrams in their textbooks during exams; now, they were required to draw the same reference diagrams from memory. For many at Yale, the change was intolerable. When nearly half of the class initiated the “Conic Sections Rebellion,” named for the diagrams of cones they refused to draw on the blackboard, Yale expelled 43 of the 96 members of the class of 1832. Horace Gould was among them, as was the son of John C. Calhoun, the then-Vice President of the United States. Yale also sent out notices to nearby colleges, warning them not to accept or enroll the rebels. Horace Gould and others like him had no choice but to return home—no amount of begging from the students or their parents could tempt Yale to reenroll them.
Coastal Georgia Historical Society
Conic Rebellion Petition
More than a century later, Horace Gould’s time at Yale became a subject of interest for local author Eugenia Price, who was planning the second book in her St. Simons trilogy, New Moon Rising. In search of more information about Horace’s life and college years, she contacted the Yale University Library, which provided her with information about the Bread and Butter and Conic Sections rebellions, including photocopies of several historical documents. This month’s featured images are drawn from the Eugenia Price collection of the Coastal Georgia Historical Society. They include a photograph of Horace Bunch Gould taken just before his death in 1881, as well as a photocopy of the handwritten petition that sparked the Conic Sections Rebellion in July of 1830.
The Coastal Georgia Historical Society presents this article and images from our archives as part of our mission “to connect people to Coastal Georgia’s dynamic history.” The Society operates the iconic St. Simons Lighthouse Museum and the World War II Home Front Museum, housed in the Historic Coast Guard Station at East Beach. To learn more about the Society, its museums, diverse programs, and membership, please visit coastalgeorgiahistory.org.
