My Spalding research continues, albeit slowly, and I plan to have new postings soon. I also have a number of new photographs received from Spalding’s family which I hope to post shortly.

Thank you for your continued comments, encouragement and patience.

To assist new visitors I’ve added a Frequently Asked Questions page that addresses most of the information published here to date. Please let me know if you have suggestions for the Baird T Spalding FAQ.

The confirmation of Spalding’s name at birth (Bayard Spaulding), and his family details enables us to examine the apocryphal stories about Spalding’s father and grandfather having a long history with India. Dr Neva Dell Hunter is quoted in Life and Teaching Vol 6 on “Baird T. Spalding III…his father Baird Spalding II and his grandfather.. Baird Spalding the first” , noting that the grandfather had been born in India. Spalding’s biographer David Bruton also makes similar claims in Baird T Spalding As I Knew Him about “John Spalding, grandfather of Baird T Spalding”, who lived the greater part of his life in India.

Baird T Spalding’s father was Stephen T Spaulding, a farmer in Cohocton, New York. Stephen Spaulding was born in 1840, the youngest of eleven children of Hiram Spaulding, an early settler in Atlanta. Stephen married Mary Hartwell in 1862 and raised his family on a seventy acre farm near the town of Cohocton, New York, where Baird was born in 1872. He grew hops and corn, and later potatoes. In 1891 the family moved to live on a farm on West Creek, near the town of Wheeler. Stephen Spaulding spent the winters in Florida where he operated a business shipping potato seed. He was known for the Spaulding Rose strain of potatoes, which remained popular until the 1930’s when it succumbed to a virus.

Stephen Spaulding was mechanically inclined and filed a number of patents on farm equipment during his life. US patent # 98,202 issued in 1869 is an agricultural cultivator invented by Spaulding. Baird was noted as having a mechanical aptitude later in life, and his father may have been his inspiration.

According to a genealogical article, Stephen Spaulding’s grandfather James Spaulding was born in England in 1772. There are no records showing a Baird Spalding I or II, or a John Spalding earlier in the family tree, and no record of a trip to India.

An alternative way to verify the history of the Spaulding family in India is the India Office Family History Search database, which contains extensive records for Europeans in India between 1600 and 1949.

Baird’s surname spelt as Spaulding only appears once in the entire India Office records, recording the marriage of an Alexander Spaulding in 1881. The Spalding variant spelling is more common as it is a popular English surname, but no variation of the name Baird Spalding appears. Two individuals named John Spalding appear in the database. The first, an infant born in 1780, would be too old to be Spalding’s grandfather. The second John Spalding was a British major in the 20th regiment of the Bengal Native Infantry, buried in 1826. Given that Stephen Spaulding was born in 1840, and that his genealogy can be firmly established via other sources, neither of these individuals are his father, or Baird Spalding’s grandfather.

As a result, both the Neva Dell Hunter and Bruton stories above about Baird’s Indian connections can clearly be considered fictional. Like Baird’s alleged English heritage or 1857 date of birth, it’s likely that these were simply stories concocted to support Life and Teachings.

Baird Spalding was the second youngest in a family of six children. Baird’s siblings included sisters Nettie, Hattie and Mary, and brothers Hiram and George. Unlike Baird, the rest of the Spaulding family remained in the New York area. Both Nettie and Hattie were members of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which organized in Cohocton in 1898. Hiram and George remained in Cohocton as farmers their entire lives. After the death of Stephen Spaulding in 1906, Baird’s mother moved from West Creek to Avoca with her son Hiram. She died on January 27th 1923, still active at the age of 89, and was buried in the Avoca Highland Cemetery.

Baird’s older sister Mary Spaulding died at the young age of twenty, but the other Spaulding sisters went on to long lives like their mother. Baird’s oldest sister Nettie Spaulding married Charles Totten in 1890 and had three daughters Bessie, Mildred and Agnes. Nettie outlived all of her siblings, dying in 1958 at the age of 92.

In addition to the passport application, several obituaries and genealogical databases corroborate this information. The oldest is an 1880 census record which lists the entire Spaulding family in Cohocton. This is the earliest official record of Baird Spalding.

Spalding’s relationship with his family is an unknown quantity, but there are several hints that Spalding may have been estranged from them for some time. Baird spelt his fathers name incorrectly on his 1935 passport application, writing ‘Steven D Spaulding’, whereas the spelling on other documents is ‘Stephen T Spaulding’. Stephen Spaulding’s own 1906 obituary mentions the other Spaulding children but omits any mention of Baird. Finally, Mary Spaulding’s 1923 obituary notes her son ‘Bayard T’ as living in Alaska at the time, but Spalding had left Alaska at least a decade earlier.

The Department of State recently released Spalding’s 1935 passport application and an affidavit of birth signed by his brother. As discussed in my earlier blog post on Spalding’s biography, Baird was an American, born Oct 3rd 1872 in Cohocton,  New York. The passport application reveals a fascinating new twist.  Spalding was born with the name Bayard Spaulding, and the adoption of the nom de plume Baird T Spalding occurred decades later.

Despite initial skepticism that Bayard Spaulding was really New Age author Baird T Spalding, there is no doubt that this is the passport application of our subject. The application was filed in September 1935, just before Spalding left for his famous India Tour. Spalding’s photograph is attached, as well as his address at the time in San Francisco. His planned departure for India on the SS President Hoover on Oct 4th confirms it beyond a doubt.

By the 1890’s, Spalding had left New York for the gold fields of the Yukon and was going by the name William Spaulding. In 1899, Spalding was arrested in Dawson City, and a Canadian consul record lists him as William Spaulding, but notes incorrectly that he is a British subject. This may be the origin of the stories that Spalding was of British descent, discussed previously on this blog. In 1906, Spalding was working in Montana under his birth name Bayard T Spaulding, now with the added middle initial.

The first use of the surname Spalding by which the public would come to know him appears on the 21st of October 1910 in a rural Californian newspaper article from the Lassen Advocate, in which Spalding is claimed to be a professor from Columbia University.

B.T. Spalding a professor in the Columbia University, is in Susanville gathering data concerning soil and crop conditions in this section and will remain several weeks.

The trip to Susanville is meaningful in more ways than one. Close to California’s legendary Mount Shasta, Susanville was the home of Spalding’s future wife, Stella Stiles. They were married in October of the following year, and from this point Spalding continues to use the name Baird T Spalding almost exclusively.

There is no evidence that Spalding ever legally changed his name, and it is difficult to determine the logic behind which name he used. In addition to Baird Spalding and William Spalding,  David Bruton’s biography claims that he also used the name Baird T Grey.

After 1906, my research has only located a single instance of Spalding using his original birth name, and that is his 1935 passport application discussed above. Close examination of the hand written sections shows that Baird still signed his name as Spalding. On a birth affidavit signed by his brother Hiram Spaulding, the additional ‘u’ in Spaulding appears to have been added afterwards. Ironically Baird’s surname was often spelled by third parties as Spaulding even when he was using the Spalding variant, and it appears this mistake was made by Spalding himself as he had been using that name for decades.

Life and Teaching Volume 6,  published by DeVorss in 1996,  relates the following tale from Dr Neva Dell Hunter about Spalding’s family involvement with India.

Baird T. Spalding was in reality Baird T. Spalding III. His father was Baird Spalding  II and his grandfather, to whom he was very close, was Baird Spalding the first. Baird III always spoke of him as “Grandpappy” and it seems he really had been born in India.

A similar story appears in David Bruton’s 1954 biography Baird T Spalding As I Knew Him, although the details are slightly changed.

John Spalding, grandfather of Baird T Spalding, lived the greater part of his life in India. He was a devout follower of the Hindu teachings.

These two stories have become the foundation of much of the apocryphal information around Spalding,  implying that Spalding had a family connection to India, and that the voyage to India that led to Life and Teachings was inspired by the travels of his father or grandfather.

In the second part of this series on Baird T Spalding’s life, we’ll examine Spalding’s family history in detail and examine the truth of these stories.

Baird T Spalding's 1935 passport photo

As regular readers are aware, my research into the fascinating story of Baird T Spalding has been delayed for several months while the Department of State searched their archives for his 1935 passport application.

The wait came to an end today, with the release of Spalding’s passport records, including an affidavit of his birth. The revelations include an alternate spelling of Spalding’s name and confirm much of the research posted here on the blog, including Spalding’s date of birth in 1872. Indeed, the passport records turned out to be critical for piercing the mystery of Spalding’s life. I’ll be posting more details over the next week, including for the first time an accurate account of Spalding’s full family history.

Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong is an obscure 1970′s Vietnamese book which purports to be a previously unpublished record of a trip Baird T Spalding took to India. The pseudonymous author Nguyên Phong claims to have found a Spalding book titled Journey to the East in a San Diego library during the 1970′s and published Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong as a Vietnamese translation. Prior to the 1980′s, there was a large number of unauthorized translations of English works in Vietnam, and Nguyên Phong is listed as translator of works by Lobsang Rampa, Myodo Satomi and Mika Waltari.

Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong however, is entirely different from Phong’s earlier translations, as it is actually a work of fiction created by Nguyên Phong. Spalding never wrote a book entitled Journey to the East, and his first book was only published in the US in 1924. Hanh Trinh Ve Phoung Dong also contains numerous historical anomalies that speak to its fictional nature, as outlined in the blog post Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong – A Vietnamese prelude to Spalding’s Life and Teachings? It is likely that Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong is an artifact of the renewed interest in Spalding during the 1970′s, and Nguyên Phong was certainly not the only author who claimed a connection with Spalding during this time. However, he certainly was the most inventive, as no other author to my knowledge has created a prequel to Spalding’s work.

Regardless of its fictional origins, Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong is a fascinating book for those of us interested in Baird T Spalding and the genre of magical autobiographies which Spalding pioneered. The thought that Spalding’s imaginary journey to India in 1894 could inspire a Vietnamese prequel eight decades later that is translated back to English after another three decades adds to the attraction for lovers of the obscure.

I conducted a brief interview with Poven Leace to understand his impressions of the book and motivations in translating it to English.

Q. Thanks for agreeing to the interview, Poven. Can you tell us how you first encountered Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong?

A. I came across “Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong” (HTVPD) by Nguyen Phong through a number of friends who worked with me in the same company in the Philippines.  They all commented, “The book has changed my perception in life.”  With that in mind, I bought a copy of HTVPD that was first published in the U.S. in 1987 by the “Nguoi Viet” Publishing House.  This edition clearly stated that HTVPD was a Vietnamese translation of “Journey to the East” (JTE) by Baird Spalding published in 1924 by the Adyar Publishing House in India, and Nguyen Phong was the translator.

Personally, HTVPD has indeed exerted a great effect on my spiritual and intellectual life.  Given this remarkable influence, I have tried to search for the original English version hoping to introduce it to my American fellows.  Unfortunately, I hitherto have not detected any trace that may lead to the original English edition.  As a Vietnamese translator, Nguyen Phong may be the only person who would have the original “Journey to the East”.  Regrettably, we do not have any luck with contacting him up until now.  Despite extensive searches for “Journey to the East”, I did not succeed.

A few years later, a new 2005-edition of HTVPD has been widely disseminated in Asian public markets in the U.S., U.K., France and Canada.  This edition discloses no publisher, but it unveils itself by a Buddhist calendar year of 2549 and reveals that Nguyen Phong derived HTVPD from a six-volume set of books entitled “Life and Teaching of the Masters of the Far East”.  After purchasing this six-volume set, it occurred to me that HTVPD had very little in common with Life and Teaching of the Masters of the Far East.  In another edition printed by ABC Printing in Costa Mesa, California, U.S.A., a short biography of Nguyen Phong on the back cover has divulged that Nguyen Phong is the penname of Vu Van Du.

It comes to our realization that the direct English re-establishment from HTVPD is the only vehicle to disseminate Spalding’s wisdom to a larger group of audience.  It is certainly not escaped our notice that HTVPD only serves people who are able to read and understand Vietnamese.  Given our intention and the unavailability of the original “Journey to the East” in the public domain, Bien Giang and I decided to re-instate it.

Q. There are some names in the Vietnamese text that don’t translate well to English. How did you deal with these words and what do you think Nguyen Phong meant by them? Any other difficulties in translating the text?

A. Regarding the translation, we do not have any problem because it is simply just a normal translation from Vietnamese to English.  In terms of proper nouns, we kept them as they were written.

Q. We’ve posted a fair amount of information on this blog that indicates HTVPD is a fictional work created by Nguyen Phong, because of the many historical discrepancies. While you were translating it, did you consider it to be a fictional work, or a record of a journey which occurred in real life? How do you account for so many discrepancies, and the lack of any record of the original 1924 book that HTVPD was allegedly translated from?

A. In our opinion, Journey to the East could be considered as a fiction book.  As you notice, the last sentence of the book suggests that another journey was about to begin.  As to the various discrepancies that are posted on your blog, we have coincidently addressed some of them in our book.

For the rest of your discrepancies, we are afraid that we cannot make any comments because they are not parts of our translation.  Regardless of whether the remaining of your discrepancies is substantiated by any source or by anyone or not, the entire contents of the English re-translation entitled “Journey to the East” remain consistent with the Vietnamese translation entitled “Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong”.

Q. Any other thoughts?

A. From our perspective, it really does not matter who composed the book; what really matters is the wisdoms from the contents of this book are disseminated widely to a larger group of audience.  Honestly speaking, the notion that is far more noteworthy is what subject matters were written than who wrote them at this point.

Thanks for the interview Poven. The English translation of Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong, titled Journey to the East, can be purchased at Amazon.com. Readers are invited to post their comments here.

Baird Spalding's birthplace in 1872

The area school was the North Cohocton-Atlanta Union School. Although there are no surviving records, it is likely that this is the school Baird attended as a youth.

North Cohocton Atlanta Union School

Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong is listed in Google Books, and can be found in libraries via Worldcat.  Jean Luc reports it was translated in Vietnamese in 1975 from a 1924 Indian book titled Journey to the East. The first publication date shown online is 1987, with Spalding listed as author and Nguyên Phong as the translator into Vietnamese. According to Google Books, Nguyên Phong has translated similar books in the mystic and occult genre, including works by Lobsang Rampa, Myodo Satomi and Mika Waltari.

Most of this book is available online, and despite the imperfect translation of Google Translate it is quite fascinating. All of the facts point to this book being a derivative fictional work written by Phong, rather than a translation of Spalding.

As visitors to this blog may have guessed, the key item that indicates this is a work of fiction is that my research has established beyond a doubt that Spalding never visited India in 1894 as he claimed in Life and Teaching. I’ll be publishing more on this topic later, including evidence which shows where Spalding spent most of the 1890′s. Logic would suggest that any prelude or sequel to the fictional 1894 visit is also fictional.

There are no references to Spalding ever having written a book titled Journey to the East published in India. The four volumes of Life and Teaching were Spalding’s only books published prior to his death in 1953.  Life and Teaching volume one was first published in San Francisco in serial form in 1922, then as a book in 1924 by the California Press.

The translation of Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong contains no mention of dates on which this journey occurred. As a reasonably detailed timeline exists for Spalding’s life from 1898 onwards, as Jean Luc suggested and the text hints, we must assume that Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong took place prior to the 1894 India mission described in Life and Teaching. Given that Spalding was born in 1872, he would have been barely 21 years old at best. It is unlikely a 21 year old would be a University professor leading a mission to India.

Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong states that Spalding was born in 1857 in England, and indicates that the mission to India departed from England. As outlined in previous posts on Spalding’s biography, this was simply a story propagated by Spalding and DeVorss, and not factual. Spalding was born in 1872 in upstate New York, but an author working in 1975 is unlikely to have known this fact, and would have assumed the 1857 date was correct.

Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong mentions many universities and professors. There are many similar claims in promotional material surrounding Spalding but these are simply not accurate. Spalding was not a professor or a doctor and according to University registrars there is no record of Spalding studying at Cornell, Stanford or Berkeley. Regardless, granting a 21 year old Spalding the title of Professor is clearly a literary invention. If there had been a mission to India funded by these universities as described in Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong, records of it would still exist today.

There are a number of errors and anachronisms in Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong which confirm that it is fictional. The most obvious error is that at least two of the people mentioned in the text either could not have accompanied Spalding on this trip, or were not alive at the time indicated.

Paul Brunton, author of A Search in Secret India, is mentioned in the book. Brunton did travel to India, but not with Spalding, and he dismissed Spalding in his notebooks which are widely available today. Most importantly, Brunton was born in 1898, and did not meet Spalding until early 1936 during Spalding’s India tour.

Another person that appears repeatedly in Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong is Professor Walter Evans-Wentz, a Stanford professor world famous for his expertise on Buddhism. According to his biography, Evans-Wentz was born in 1878 in New Jersey, and completed elementary school in June, 1892. He worked as a journalist before enrolling at Stanford in 1901. The earliest record of Evans-Wentz visiting India is 1910. Evans-Wentz’s papers are available at Oxford, Stanford and there is a published biography  (Pilgrim of the clear light, by Ken Winkler). There are no references to Spalding in Evans-Wentz’s biography at Google Books and no record of the claimed trip described in Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong.

Finally, Chapter 1 of Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong makes reference to an infamous Time magazine cover proclaiming God is Dead, which was published in April 1966. This would be impossible for a book written in 1924, or indeed any book written by Spalding, who died in 1953.

The 1970′s was a time of broad excitement in the New Age and a renewal of interest in Baird T Spalding. Several other mystics claimed a connection with Spalding around this time, and many of their claims have since proven to be inspired more by the desire for publicity rather than accuracy. Since Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong was published in Vietnamese only, it probably flew under the radar of Spalding’s publisher DeVorss & Co. A long article in a Vietnamese online forum gives some background to the book, and claims that Nguyên Phong is the alias of a Boeing software engineer who wrote the book after emigrating from Vietnam to the US. It would be interesting to find out from Nguyên Phong what inspired him to write this book and expand on the Spalding mythos.

Readers with more information on Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong are invited to comment below.

Fellow mystic and DeVorss author David Bruton wrote about Spalding’s birth date in Baird T Spalding As I Knew Him, a self-published biography released in 1954. On May 26, 1952, Bruton attended a 95th birthday party for Spalding at the DeVorss offices in Los Angeles, and discussed the discrepancies in Spalding’s age with one of the guests. On writing the biography, Bruton noted the idiosyncrasies.

On two different occasions I asked him where he was born. The first time he told me in “upstate New York;” the second, “Spalding, England.” During one of his last public lectures a member of the audience asked where he was born and he answered, “In India.” He spoke with equal affection for the “old family home” in upstate New York, in Spalding, England and in Coconada, Madras Province, India.

As the executor of the Spalding estate, Bruton was given Spalding’s personal effects, including California and New Mexico drivers licenses, both bearing a birthdate of May 26, 1904. Bruton describes the reason for these as follows.

The story behind the story of his birthdate of May 26 1904 is that authorities refused to grant him a license to drive because of his age. The next time Spalding applied for a license, he removed that stumbling block. His New Mexico license was restricted to an an area within a few miles of his mining claims. He had little respect for restrictions of any kind and this one did not hamper him. He made many trips to Los Angeles driving on the restricted license and died in Arizona with it in his pocket.

Bruton concludes that Spalding was born in 1872 in upstate New York, but settles on the May 26th birth date, presumably due to the birthday party he attended on that date.

An article on Baird Spalding in J Gordon Melton’s Biographical Dictionary of American Cult and Sect Leaders notes the controversy as follows.

Although he claimed an age of ninety-five at the time of his death, thus setting a birthdate in the 1850s, more recent research has established that he was born in upstate New York in 1872. Spaulding hid much of his early life, even from his close friends, in an effort to add to the aura of mystery about his contacts with the “masters.”

My research has yet to yield a US passport record for Spalding, and birth certificates were not issued prior to 1880 in Steuben County, New York. However, the 1880 US Census and the 1936 immigration record stand as the most authoritative data so far, and add support to Bruton and Melton’s conclusions. The evidence points to Spalding being born Oct 3, 1872, in North Cohocton, New York.  By the time Life and Teaching of the Masters of the Far East was published by DeVorss in 1935, Spalding and DeVorss promoted an alternative biography for Spalding, perhaps as a promotional gimmick, or perhaps to obscure Spalding’s true life story. Other details about Spalding that have been overlooked will be explored in future posts.

For now, let the record be clear. When a sudden heart attack ended his life in an Arizona motel on March 18, 1953, Baird Spalding, a native of upstate New York, was eighty years old.