Early Life and Education
Sandford was born in Bowdoinham, Maine, the tenth child of a farming family. As a young man Frank was a natural leader. An early companion recalled that he was always the one who "drove the horse and steered the boat"; if they played ball, "he was always a captain." His father died when Frank was fourteen, and by sixteen he was teaching school during an era in which physical prowess was often necessary to establish classroom discipline.
During his second year of teaching, Sandford reluctantly attended a revival meeting at his mother's Free Baptist church and was converted on February 29, 1880. He threw away his tobacco and announced his conversion publicly, not only at church but also at Nichols Latin School, where worldly cosmopolitanism was the preferred pose.
Entering Bates College on a general scholarship, Sandford was elected class president and served as both coach and catcher of the baseball team. He graduated in 1886 with honors and was chosen to give a commencement address. For a summer he captained a semi-pro baseball team and was approached by professional scouts. After a teammate ridiculed him for attending church on the annual State of Maine Fast Day, Sandford returned to Bates to attend Cobb Divinity School.
Frustrated by the seminary's mixture of formalism and religious modernism, Sandford later said that God had addressed him directly with words from the gospel of Matthew, "Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled." For the rest of his life he distrusted academic religion. Soon thereafter the twenty-four-year-old dropped out of seminary after he was called as pastor by the Freewill Baptist church in Topsham, Maine. Sandford was frenetically energetic, and within three years his revivals resulted in three hundred conversions and more than a hundred baptisms. Besides serving as pastor, he became principal of the Topsham schools and organized sports programs for both local children and workers at a paper mill.
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