Here's another group photo from the 1960 Bohemian of some faculty of that era.
See if you can identify any of them. This appears to be in the Wightman Hall dining room or canteen. Note the cigarettes to go with the coffee!
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Category: Photographs
At graduation this year, the class of 1960 will hold its fifty-year reunion.
Here are some photos from the 1960 Bohemian – today, I'm putting up a few pictures of faculty members and staff members. See if you know who some of them are.
This administrator was already working at the college when he earned his degree, with Phi Beta Kappa honors, in 1960. (Some suggested he got good grades because he signed his professors' paychecks, but he was in fact a very good student.)
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A picture mystery
Here's a photo from the archives' collection of campus aerial photos.
Can you guess the date of the photo? Click on the photo for a larger image in a pop-up window.
Let me have your guesses – I'll give the answer in a few days.
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Basketball, 1906
I hope the picture that came to the archives today represents a good omen.
Today, Mr. Perry Dukes, the grandson of T. E. Dukes of the class of 1907, came by the archives with a photograph of the 1905-06 basketball team. To my knowledge, this is the oldest basketball team photo in the collection.
The December 1905 Wofford College Journal lists the following as the team members: P. L. Martin, center; C. A. Johnson, right guard; P. K. Switzer, left guard; S. L. Allen, right forward; P. E. Dukes, left forward; G. S. Coffin Jr and R. E. Holroyd, substitutes.
Here's a copy of the photo. Mr. Dukes is on the right end of the front row.
And what do I mean about this being a good omen? If you follow Wofford basketball, you'll know what I mean!
Click on the image for a larger version.
Last week, I posted the oldest faculty photo in the collection. Today, I'm posting the newest one. This photo was taken by college photographer extraordinare Mark Olencki '75 before opening convocation on Thursday, Sept. 10.
I haven't been able to determine exactly when our faculty began to wear academic regalia, but I think it was in the 1920s. I've seen photos of Commencement in the 1930s where the faculty are in caps and gowns, and I've seen references in President Henry N. Snyder's correspondence to graduates who were receiving master's degrees that they needed to obtain a proper gown.
Many people ask about the varying types of gown and the meaning of the hoods. The hood is the multi-colored piece of cloth that is worn over the shoulders, for those of you who don't know what it's called. The hood's trim and lining are a code – they will tell the observer where the wearer got his or her degree, whether it was a master's or doctoral degree, and in what field the degree was awarded. In this picture, you see a lot of deep blue – that's the color for the PhD – the degree awarded for original research in the arts and sciences. You may see some white – the color for some doctoral degrees in the humanities and for the master of arts – and you'll see some golden yellow – the color for some PhD degrees awarded in the natural sciences and for the degree of master of science (Master's hoods are thinner). Several of the librarians wear hoods with yellow trim for the master of library and information science degree. Degree holders in education are light blue, in theology are scarlet, and law are purple. Some business degree hoods are copper, fine arts are brown, music is a shade of pink. Traditionally, gowns are black, but many universities have adopted official gowns in their school colors, so you can see President Dunlap's Harvard crimson gown on the front row.
One of the rituals surrounding the start of each academic year is opening convocation. For a good number of years, this has been a full-dress convocation, with faculty, librarians, and administrators processing in academic regalia.
One of the rituals that we have observed in more years than not is the annual photo on the steps of Main Building. The tradition of taking a photo of the faculty is a fairly old one. Below, I'm sharing the oldest faculty photo in our collection.
Pictured, from left to right: Whitefoord Smith, professor of English, 1855-93; James H. Carlisle, professor of mathematics, 1854-1875 and president of the college, 1875-1902; David Duncan, professor of ancient languages, 1854-1881; A. H. Lester, professor of history and Biblical literature, 1866-1873; Warren DuPre, professor of natural science, 1854-1875; and A. M. Shipp, president of the college and professor of mental and moral philosophy, 1859-1875. Click on the photo for a larger version in a pop-up window.) This group served together for an extended period of time; in fact, with the exception of Lester, they were together from 1859 to 1875. Three of them were elected to the original faculty.
The modern faculty is considerably larger and more diverse than this group, with 118 full-time professors teaching at the college this fall.
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Student Body 1891-92
Student Body 1891-92
Originally uploaded by Wofford Archives
This photo from the winter of 1891-92 shows the students in front of Main Building. Notice how many of them are wearing hats. You can see a few students sitting on the steps or in one of the doors to the building.
Click on the image to see a larger view over on my Flickr page. When you get over to Flickr, click on the "all sizes" button, just above the photo, to see a larger version of the image.
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Student Body 1897-98
Student Body 1897-98
Originally uploaded by Wofford Archives
We're doing a lot of photo digitizing this summer in the archives, and today, I'm sharing a picture of the student body during the 1897-1898 school year. Notice the women students in the front row. In 1897, the college embarked on what proved to be a short-lived experiment in coeducation.
I hope you'll check out a larger version of this photo on my flickr page. Click on the image to go there.
Today I posted a series of aerial photos of the campus to my Flickr page and made them available from the Wofford Archives web page.
Photos do more than simply let you see what a place looked like at a specific time, though that's certainly important. More than that, they tell a story. This series of photos shows how, slowly but surely, the Wofford of today grew out of a small collection of buildings. Many of the buildings in these pictures are still with us, though modified. Some buildings deteriorated to the point that they no longer served a purpose and were demolished. We haven't torn down many buildings here, but some have been.
These photos document the changing landscape of the campus over the past 90 years. When I see a picture of the campus, I generally use the presence or absence of certain buildings to establish a date or an approximate date for the building. Of course, sometimes the best we can do is guess within a certain range.
The earliest photo appears to be from the 1920s. That's about as specific as I can get, because we didn't build things quite as often back then as we have in recent years.
Here's the 1920s photo
Here is a slide show of the various images.
Enjoy the slides. If you want to see full versions of the images, see the set on Flickr. You can also check out other collections I've posted there.
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Baseball pictures
Just about everyone who visits the archives or looks in one of our display cases enjoys looking at our old photos. I like to pass these around when student groups come in for classes because often, the subjects are things with which students today can relate. Yesterday, I gave a presentation to two sections of the history research methods class, a course required of all history majors at Wofford. I took it myself about 17 years ago. (Now I feel old.) I passed around a photo of the student body from 1899 as an example of how photographs can be viewed as evidence. In this case, the photograph is evidence that we had women students at Wofford during those years. Here's a link to that photo.
I also showed them some photos of baseball teams. Since we are nearing the end of college baseball season, and I've neglected to talk very much about baseball this spring, here are pictures of two of our older teams – one from 1895, the other from 1914. During this era, baseball was arguably more popular on campus than football, which was banned by many colleges, including Wofford, for many years because of the violent nature of the game. The 1895 team was especially good, with the likes of A. M. Chreitzberg, the left-most player on the first row, who was one of the college's first pitchers to throw a curve ball. He allegedly learned to throw a curve by milking the family cow. He was a fairly recent inductee into the Wofford athletic hall of fame.
Here's the 1914 team below:
This summer, my student assistants and I will be working on digitizing many of these older college photos – sports teams, literary societies, class photos – so that we'll be able to make them more widely available on the web. Stay tuned! (Yes, we librarians and archivists stick around for the summer while our faculty colleagues undertake other projects!)