I recently have been going through press clippings from the Middletown Press. The press clippings are just one part of a larger collection of photographs, negatives, and articles from the Middletown Press that myself and two others are going through and filing. Today, I couldn’t help but stop when I came across an envelope marked J.C. Penney. It could be that holiday commercials have already gotten to me, but more likely, I paused because this envelope was thicker than others. Inside, there was a pamphlet of a speech Penney gave called “A Brief Outline of My Early History.”

The pamphlet was published by the First Baptist Church in Monroe, Louisiana, and a photograph of Penney, with his hair sleeked to the side and his bow tie carefully arranged, takes up the center part the cover. Within the pamphlet, Penney describes his life, from growing up in a poor family in Mississippi to running a large, nationwide department store from its headquarters in New York. Throughout his speech, Penney emphasizes the importance of Christianity and a strong work ethic.

After reading the speech, I couln’t help but wonder how the pamphlet came to the Middletown Press. There isn’t a date of publication on the pamphlet, and the envelope did not contain an accompanying article from the Middletown Press. On the back cover of the pamphlet, however, I found a few notes that were difficult to read. But from what I could make out, it seems that J.C. Penney might have come to Middletown’s YMCA, and that the pamphlet was a bit of preliminary reading for the Press’s reporter.

If this were the case, I wonder what influence Wesleyan as a Methodist institution had on bringing Penney to Middletown. Special Collections and Archives has many documents about the University’s Methodist origins and student activities related to the religion. Many of these primary sources deal with missionary work that dispersed Wesleyan alumni across the globe. If this pamphlet did have something to do with Wesleyan’s role as a focal point for religion, it is just another example of how Wesleyan students and alumni were part of a larger network.

We continue to go through the photographs, negatives, and press clippings, and there will be a finding aid soon. Can’t wait to see what other things we’ll come across to share!

We have been adding student theses to WesScholar, our online repository of Wesleyan scholarship. We have most of the 2009 and 2008 theses, a smaller number of 2007 theses, and we’re adding earlier theses as time allows. We just added one of our all time most popular theses, The “Quails”: the History of Wesleyan University’s First Period of Coeducation, 1872-1912.

Written in 1972, Louise “Lucy” Wilby Knight sent surveys to those female and male students who had been present for Wesleyan’s coeducation “experiment” (1872-1912). Elderly at the time, these alumni and alumna remembered their experiences at Wesleyan and provided an invaluable record of that first period of coeducation. Special Collections & Archives also has Knight’s original research notes and completed surveys.

Now that The Quails is available online, more readers will be able to learn about Wesleyan’s history–and see the incredible work completed by Wesleyan students!

Special Collections & Archives will be open today, Friday, May 8 from 2pm to 5pm, and tomorrow, Saturday, May 9, from 1pm to 4pm. The extra Saturday hours are intended to help students complete their research in our department.

We send our condolences to the family and friends of Johanna Justin-Jinich. Our campus mourns together.

I recently came across an interesting collection of the Great Hollow Wilderness School, a Wesleyan run summer wilderness program for disadvantaged youth.  In the late 1960s, a 1,440 acre wildlife preserve on New Fairfield  (almost on the New York-Connecticut border) was will to Wesleyan and in 1969, the Great Hollow Wilderness School was created.  The program was created as a sort of combination of  Upward Bound and Outward Bound.  Wesleyan was invested in the project in many ways, including staffing the program with students and even creating a graduate level class in outdoor education leadership.

In 1985, Wesleyan decided to use the land for something other than the Great Hollow Wilderness School, and began the WOW program, the Wesleyan Orientation in the Wilderness.  Wesleyan hosted a few-night camping trip for incoming freshman.  The majority of the collection, besides some files with program information, is made up of the paraphernalia from both the Great Hollow Wilderness School and WOW, including the very 1980s t-shirts from the summer program, some goofy hats, and the WOW water bottles given to the participants of the program.

Now knowing about the Great Hollow land, I am curious as to what has happened to it.  Does Wesleyan still own it?  There is very little written information in this collection and I would like to find out more.  How long did the WOW program last?  I can’t find much about it after the mid-1990s, but is seemed to be a success.  Do we use the land for anything, even perhaps for field work during the year?  What has happened to the Wilderness School?  I should only hope that the school is using such a great piece of land appropriately and I would encourage the reinstatement of a program like WOW.

Tags: Summer program, Wesleyan-owned land

Celebrate EARTH DAY with SC&A

Wednesday April 22, 2009 3:00-5:00pm

Don’t miss the opportunity to come to Olin Library and step into Special Collections & Archives between 3:00-5:00pm on Wednesday April 22 to see some of our materials selected specifically for our Earth Day exhibit. Our newly acquired atlas “EARTH” will be on display. Sure, we’ve all seen an atlas before but Wesleyan University owns the mother of all atlases in “EARTH,” which takes cartography and publishing to a new stratosphere. More than 100 international cartographers, oceanographers, and geographers have produced an astounding 355 maps covering 194 countries. Adding to this cartographic feat, the massive 580 pages contain extensive country text, covering all the nations of the world. EARTH also presents four stunning gatefolds measuring 1.8 meters across, including one titled “Earth from the Sky at Night”, a stunning image taken by NASA. More than 800 exquisite images were sourced from prestigious picture libraries, including a large number of images taken by National Geographic photographers. Only 3,000 copies of this highly prized volume have been printed. Highly detailed maps, produced by a team of international cartographers, are the foundation of this book. Each of the countries of the world is also described and illustrated in detail, with focus on the geography, history, culture, and unique features. I guarantee seeing this atlas will be worth your walk over or we will give you a free pencil. Just the fact that you read this much of this blog post means we will give you a free pencil. All you have to do is ask when you get here.

Are you wondering what ever happened to those old cards people use to have to look through one-by-one to find a book location? Since we no longer use a physical card catalog we will have on display a few ways the staff has found to repurpose, recycle, and reuse them as part of our Earth Day exhibit.

In 1939, the Wesleyan Alumni Council started collecting alumni memories, which included those of Wesleyan professors, pranks, the burning of North College in 1906, and the arrival of women in 1872. This collection, the Alumni Council Collection of Recollections, has been a pleasure to read. Because of the nature of these anecdotes, in this post I’m going to do a round of “WesBusters” (like the TV show MythBusters) and see how much of it I can validate as fact or myth.

STORY 1

There are exciting stories about competitions between the Freshmen and Sophomore class on Washington’s birthday to be the first to fire a cannon.  In one instance in 1892, the competition went terribly wrong when a bomb (meant to be a decoy of the cannon fire) exploded in a Freshmen’s hands and blew up parts of North College.

CONFIRMED: several newspaper clippings confirm this event really occurred.

STORY 2

In the 1880s, the faithful Methodist Wesleyan men would set fire to a “scandalous” billboard owned by the Colgrove Opera House (which housed burlesque shows). The billboard was located on the corner of High and College Streets and faced the dormitory, which was then North College. It featured “drapeless contours” of feminine forms which were often offensive to prim Wesleyanites of that period.  However, every time the students burnt down the billboard, Colgrove would replace it.

PLAUSIBLE: One other source also mentions these events.

STORY 3

Then there’s the story of the campus mummy. During the 1880s Professor Van Benschoten went on sabbatical in Athens. While he was away he purchased a mummy from an institution that was in need of cash. However, after the mummy was shipped to the port in Athens, the dock official mentioned that Van Benny was missing a permit (or a bribe). Van Benny went to the British Consulate (since there was no American consulate at the port) and asked for help. Upon hearing his story they suggested that he wait a couple days and something might happen to relieve the situation. He waited and on the morning of the third day, a British warship had arrived in the night to end any shenanigans over the shipment of the mummy.

The mummy used to be on display in the Wesleyan Museum, which was in Judd Hall. Later the mummy was stored in the attic of Olin Library, unsecured. In 1990, a student discovered the mummy and hid it in his unsuspecting friend’s bed. The mummy lost a finger during this adventure and now is under lock and key.

FACT: There are many articles in Special Collections & Archives that identify Van Benschoten as the original purchaser of the mummy and a couple of Argus articles about the mummy in the bed.

STORY 4

And finally a piece of economic landscaping advice from the 1870s written by A. Sear Pruden (class of 1914). “I cannot vouch for the authenticity of this story but as Joseph Jefferson once said when questioned as to the actual historical background of his anecdotes, ‘One might say the story is good enough to be true.’”

“It seems in the good old days that the Board of Trustees of the University was dominated by a few economical and hard-fisted Connecticut and New England Yankees. The quite sizable area of campus in front of College Row boasted a crop of grass that might have done credit to the pampas. There was a considerable debate at the Board of Trustees meeting as to how the grass could be kept from entirely overrunning the college grounds. Instead of employing manual grass cutters, it was decided to buy a flock of sheep and pasture them on the front lawn where they would, by grazing, keep the grass down to a respectable height. The flock of sheep duly arrived and were pastured on the campus. Shortly after, the college body was very much astounded, going to the Chapel one morning, to be greeted by scores and scores of pitiful bleatings which apparently were projected out of the ground. On close inspection it was found that some mischievous people had buried each one of these sheep up to the neck in the ground, allowing only their heads to protrude from the ground. The chapel and college exercises were suspended for the day to enable the entire college body to join in the excavating and exhuming of the sheep.” Or so the story goes!

BUSTED: There is no way students could have dug several scores of holes in one night and captured all the sheep without being noticed.  It is plausible that the university did purchase sheep to take care of the landscaping, however.

If you like the stories here, check out the Alumni Council Collection of Recollections. A newly available finding aid can be found on the SC&A website.

My latest processing project is that of the Middletown Manuscript collection dating from 1668 to 1937.  The collection is made up of a variety of documents from the Middletown area with no real common theme except for the location.  The collection is not very big, but it is filled with some interesting documents, not only for their content, but also for their design.  There are bills and tickets and deeds and money and many of them are quite beautiful, even if not entirely legible.  One of the largest sections of the collection is the folder containing about fifteen different deeds.  These, being legal documents, are not the best looking but are interesting printed forms with blanks to fill in the appropriate information: name and location of the person selling the land, name and location of the person buying the land, amount of land, cost of the land, etc.

Some of my other favorite information from this collection are the shipping folders, one from the 18th century and one from the 19th century.  They contain information about the cost of a trip on a ship, lists of items bought, lists of the ship’s crew, as well as some great looking tickets for trips on the ships.

These are two tickets form the 18th century folder, from 1829 and 1831, both on steamboats in Connecticut.

The 19th century tickets, while there are only a couple, are reflective of the change in technology.  The most interestingly designed ticket is for the New Haven, New York & Hartford railroad from 1891.  Railroads became an important part of Middletown beginning in the mid-19th century when the big railroad companies began to develop lines through Middletown.  There are a few letters from the big companies to the people of Middletown and surrounding towns telling them whose land they would be building through and a date to meet with a representative to object to the proposed plans, but I highly doubt the rail companies really took any complaints into consideration.

Train ticket from 1891 still intact!

Along with all these legal documents are some from the bank, specifically some paper money, and even some bank IOUs.  They are really quite beautiful and like most printed official documents of the time, they have blank spots for the pertinent information to be filled in, such as the date and the name of the person to whom the bank owes money.

A $10 IOU from the MIddletown bank in May of 1918.

The last two folder of the collection contain information about the Addises, a prominent Middletown family.  The entire first section is a collection of bills and checks to and from Ms. Daisy Addis, apparently quite the shopper.  From all the different bills Ms. Addis seems to have accumulated, it is really amazing to see how many shops there were along Main Street in Middletown in at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century!

A receipt from J. H. Bunce, Dry Goods, Carpets, and Furniture for the purchase a chair, $1.75, in 1898.

The rest of the Addis collection is mostly made up of deeds and legal documents, mostly revolving around the Doane family, who seemed to have quite a lot of land in the Middletown area.  Overall, the fact that this collection contians various documents makes it all the more interesting, as we get a little bit of Middletown history from a lot of different sectors: legal, commercial, nautical, etc.  If you have any interest in the history of Middletown, I recommend checking this collectiuon out as you may get a new look on some aspects of daily life from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries!

Tags: 17th century, 18th century, 19th century, legal documents

A publisher’s proof copy of a novel, with the author’s own edits and revisions hand-written throughout, gives us a rare glimpse into the author’s writing process. What sections did he or she cut? How were phrases rewritten, or words exchanged for other, better choices? We have such a view into the writing process of the 20^th-century Austrian novelist Joseph Roth, thanks to the generosity of the Kallir family.

Joseph Roth’s novel, Die Geschichte der 1002. Nacht, written in the late 1930s, has been described as an “anti-fairy tale,” mixing exotic settings and characters (a harem in Persia, the Persian Shah and his chief eunuch) with those of a morally lax and callous Vienna during the final period of the Hapsburg Monarchy.

In 1937, the Dutch publisher, De Gemeenschap, printed a small run of copies of the novel for Roth’s friends. But before the novel’s official publication in 1939, Roth made extensive revisions, cuts, and edits in a proof copy that his publisher had sent him. The final version is over 60 pages shorter than the original. That proof copy is now owned by Wesleyan’s Special Collections department. Scholars can now study exactly what cuts and changes Roth made to his text, indicated in his own handwriting.

Tags: Annotations, German fiction, Joseph Roth, Proof copy

Please join us for a celebration of writer William Manchester’s career on Thursday, February 5 at 7pm in the Smith Reading Room in Olin Library. The event, titled “William Manchester: Portrait of a Writer,” will kick off with a talk by Leith Johnson, Project Archivist, and Jenny Miglus, Archives Assistant. They will discuss Manchester’s life and career, and talk about their experience processing the papers. After a reception at 7:40, Professor Claire Potter will speak at 8pm about Manchester and his role in communicating history to a broad audience.

This celebration is being held in conjunction with the opening of an exhibit of the same name in Olin Library, and coincides with the completion of the processing of the Manchester Papers. A finding aid will be available soon.

The Friends of the Wesleyan Library are sponsoring this event. Hope to see you there!

The Godfrey Library in Middletown, CT, a rich center for genealogical history, recently announced that it has made three major resources on Middletown and Middlesex County history available digitally from its website. The three volumes’ titles and descriptions, from the Godfrey’s website:

Statistical Account of the County of Middlesex, in Connecticut, by David Dudley Field (originally published in 1819) includes all manner of intriguing information about events major and mundane, from murders to mining to the mysterious Moodus noises.

The 1884 History of Middlesex County with Biographical Sketches of its Prominent Men, (published in 1884) includes detailed histories of each of the 16 towns in the county, highlighting religious, military, and industrial heritage along with interesting tidbits about fixtures of local life such as taverns, newspapers, and schools. It includes biographies of more than 150 notable individuals, and portraits of more than 50 of them.

The 1903 Commemorative Biographical Record of Middlesex County (published in 1903) features biographies of more than a thousand men – and a few women – that were prominent at the turn of the twentieth century, along with their family lineages, and hundreds of portraits. The majority of the biographies are of individuals with roots that extended back to the colonial era, some of whose names are still part of the landscape today, such as Russell, Wilcox, Pelton, Lyman, and Gildersleeve. However, among them are included biographies of a number of recently arrived immigrants from Ireland, Scotland, and Germany, with names like Dunn and Inglis and Kretzmer, who had prospered in their adopted homeland.

These resources are invaluable for historians and genealogical researchers, and we are delighted that the Godfrey Library and Middlesex County Community Foundation teamed up to make these scarce materials widely available.