Wofford College - From The Archives

The Faculty, the late 2000s 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.  

The Faculty, the late 1860s version

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.  

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.

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.  

Aerial Photos of the Wofford Campus

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.  

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!)  

New Photo Collection

In addition to sharing some of Wofford's history or the history of Methodism in South Carolina on this blog, sometimes I highlight new collections, interesting documents, or old photographs.  Today, I'm hlghlighting a collection of photographs that my student assistants and I have been working on for several months.  Several years ago, I found an old photo album maintained by a Methodist minister from the late 19th century.  With a better scanner and better ways to present these images, my student assistants scanned all of the indivudal photos in the album.  Over the past few weeks, I've been trying to get them uploaded to Flickr and labeled in such a way that a researcher could find them.  

We've added about 35 photos to this point, and there are about 150 in the album in total.  So far, I've got the pictures of a group of bishops, of a few of the ministers, and of some individuals who must have been friends or family members of the Rev. William Wynn Mood, who maintained the album.  

Here's the set page for the William Wynn Mood Album, in Flickr

These photos will be useful to local church historians who are looking for photos of some of their earlier ministers, as the album covers years prior to the first conference biographical directory.  I'll continue to add items to this album until I have the entire set of photos added, with information about as many of the individuals as I can locate.  Then, I'll start adding the photos from the 1901 and 1914 biographical directoies.  

The two photos come from the album.  They are the Rev. Frederick Auld, above, who was a Methodist minister in South Carolina from 1858 to 1902, and Bishop William Wallace Duncan, left, who was a Wofford graduate in 1858, a Methodist minister in Virginia, a Wofford professor, and a Methodist bishop from 1886 to 1908.  

The Student Body, circa 1900

It might be difficult, if not impossible, to get Wofford's entire student body on the front steps of Main Building today.  Senior class photos most always happen there, but many of the early student body pictures were also taken in front of Old Main.  These photos of the student body come from 1897, 1898, and 1900 and are part of the archives collection. 

In the late 1890s, the student body usually numbered about 200, with about 10 professors.
 
Of course, old photographs fascinate us for many reasons, and students, alumni, and friends alike always pause as they quietly examine these old artifacts.  They are much more than just objects of antiquarian or sentimental interest, however,  There's much we can learn from these documents.  For example, when I pass one of these photos around a group of students, I ask them to look carefully and tell me if they spot something they aren't used to seeing.  Invariably, someone spots the women.  These photos document the presence of women in the student body well before the 1970s. 

More than that, photographs help us put a face on the past.  How many times a day do we who work and study here pass those front steps without truly thinking of how long that building has stood on that site, or remembering how many people have gone before us to build up this college.   

Top: The student body in 1897. 
Middle: The student body and faculty in 1898
Bottom: The student body and faculty in 1900

Photos from the Snyder Papers

Below are a few photographs that I found as we began putting the final touches on the Snyder Papers. 

We've completed the major weeding of some 20 file cabinet drawers of presidential records, and today, we looked through a few smaller boxes of materials, mostly donated in the 1950s by Mrs. Snyder, that were already on the shelf in the archives.  Most of the materials are what I classify as personal materials - articles by Snyder, some of his personal correspondence, biographical materials, and even his Phi Beta Kappa key from Vanderbilt University.  We'll put the biographical materials, the articles, and some of his personal correspondence in order and wrap this project up shortly.  In the meantime, here are some of the photos of both Snyder, his house, and of him with other people.

The first photo is a small snapshot taken in 1916, when he would have been 51 years old.  The second simply reads "age 38, which would have put the photo around 1903. 

The third image appears to have been taken in Andrews Fieldhouse, which means it had to have been taken after 1929.  Perhaps it's at the college's 75th anniversary celebration. 

The fourth image comes from Commencement in 1939.  Snyder is in the left foreground.  Behind him is Wofford alumnus and United States Senator Ellison D. "Cotton Ed" Smith.  The photo shows that faculty members were wearing academic regalia by the 1930s. 

The final two photographs are campus scenes.  One is of Dr. Snyder's campus home, now called Snyder House.  The other is a winter scene, probably from the 1920s or 1930s. 

Click on an image to bring up a larger version.  In the next week or so, we'll post a new guide to the Snyder Papers, and perhaps copies of an address or two. 

Alumni Hall

I’m not sure any building on campus has had as many names as the Hugh S. Black Building. 

We still have a handful of nineteenth century buildings on the campus – Main Building and the four homes that made up the original campus. But I’m not sure that many people on campus realize that the building that houses Admission and Financial Aid offices is another structure dating from the nineteenth century.

Times seemed good in Spartanburg during the 1880s. With railroads and textiles, the city was experiencing its first taste of prosperity since before the Civil War. Wofford had never officially provided housing for students, preferring instead to let them board with families in the village or with professors on campus. The home-like atmosphere, trustees and professors felt, would be better for the students. But by the 1880s, with enrollment hovering in the upper 70s, and with students living in unused rooms in Main Building, the trustees decided to build three cottages to be used as dormitories.  

When the alumni got wind of the plan, in a spell of generosity, they asked to be allowed to raise the money for a single dormitory for the students. They pledged to raise $10,000, and they organized local alumni chapters throughout the state to raise the funds. The trustees accepted the alumni association’s offer, though it took some time for the alumni to actually raise the funds.

And so, with Masonic rites and with much of Spartanburg’s leadership looking on, the college laid the cornerstone of Alumni Hall on Friday, October 19, 1888. Edgar L. Archer, of the class of 1871, who had made substantial contributions to the construction of the building, led the opening prayer, and the featured address was a biographical sketch of Benjamin Wofford, presented by John Bomar Cleveland of the class of 1869, another significant donor and later a trustee of the college. President Carlisle also spoke.

When the building opened it was, as one observer described, “commodious and well appointed, and furnished with all modern conveniences, and is a pleasant home for many students.” The building, as originally built and as the photo shows, was four stories tall.

In 1895, Alumni Hall became the home of the Wofford Fitting School, which had been in operation since 1887 in the buildings of the old Spartanburg Female College, in what became the Spartan Mill village. Alumni Hall remained part of the fitting school complex until it was discontinued in 1924.  

As is the case with buildings at so many colleges, fire played a role in Alumni Hall’s history. On the night of January 18, 1901, a fire nearly destroyed the building. It was, as The Journal reported, a severe loss to the college.  In the aftermath of the fire, the Journal reported, “the kindness of the people of all parts of the city to the students of the Fitting School was very gratifying to the college authorities. Telephone messages came thick and fast to offer temporary homes to the young men, and they were soon provided for.” President Carlisle was reportedly unsure as to what action to take, but the trustees quickly decided both to rebuild the hall and to build a larger facility for the Fitting School’s classrooms. The new building, constructed next door to the re-named Archer Hall, provided extra recitation rooms for the students in the Fitting School. Archer Hall was rebuilt, but without its third and fourth floors, and took its new name from the largest original donor to the building.

With the closure of the Fitting School, Archer Hall reverted to the college. The building was used as a dormitory until the 1950s, though in the late 1940s, it was used as meeting space for fraternities. In the early 1950s, the building was re-conditioned for use as a dormitory to meet enrollment growth. With gifts from Spartanburg’s Black family, the building received its third name: the Hugh S. Black Dormitory. By 1959, it had become the home of various campus offices, and at that point, it became the Hugh S. Black Building.

In the early 1980s, the neighboring Snyder Hall was demolished, and in 1986, the Black Building was connected to the newly-constructed Neofytos Papadopoulos Building.  

Pictures: Alumni Hall-the Hugh S. Black Building-at different points in its long life.