FARMINGTON – A retired professor at the University of Maine at Farmington has given the school a $1.3 million gift.

Professor emeritus Bill Berry made the donation to endow the university’s first-ever endowed chair. The position will be filled by a geology professor.

Berry of Farmington taught geology and geosciences courses at the school for 26 years before retiring in 1996.

“Here is a faculty member who felt so good about his relationship and experiences with his university and his colleagues that he wanted to do something special,” said the school’s president, Theodora Kalikow.

The chair is named after Forrest P. Dexter Jr., a part-time geology teacher at the University of Maine at Farmington in the 1970s and ’80s.