Category: Documents

And a happy post-Homecoming Monday to all of you.

Lest you think all of us on campus are taking a day off to recover from the weekend’s festivities, here’s some evidence that some of us are working.

This summer, my student assistants and I worked on several scanning projects.  Now that I’ve dug myself out from a few other projects, I’ve finally gotten around to posting some of the evidence of their work.  One project involved scanning a small booklet of photographs from 1898 called Wofford College Illustrated.  It’s sort of like an early version of an admissions brochure and a yearbook.  I’ve put the images on Flickr, which some of you may be familiar with.  The booklet is 32 pages, and has pictures of what a Wofford chemistry or mineralogy lab looked like in 1898.  There are also photos of the gymnasium, the library, the faculty, the four classes as well as the fitting school class, and a few Spartanburg scenes.

So, I invite you to check out Wofford College Illustrated at your leisure.  There’s also a link to the booklet from the Archives Digital Collections page (you can also check out the Carlisle “Memories of Wofford College” and the “Memoirs of Sandor Teszler” while you’re visiting Digital Collections.

This fall, Littlejohn Project Archivist Luke Meagher and I have put together an exhibit of political items from the college archives and the Littlejohn Collection.  The exhibit is in the display cases just inside the front door of the library, and it should be up for several weeks.

From the archives, you’ll find a photo of Ambassador Ben Hill Brown, class of 1935, receiving his credentials as ambassador to Liberia from President Lyndon Johnson in 1965.  The photograph is autographed by President Johnson.  There’s also a photo of retired Air Force Major General John Beverly Montgomery, class of 1933, with President John F. Kennedy in 1962.  There’s an autographed photo of a young Olin D. Johnston, Wofford’s most prominent alumnus-politician in the middle years of the twentieth century.  We have some campaign matreials from different alumni who have run for public office.

A few Old Gold and Black stories round out the archives portion of the display, including an article about students’ preference for Richard Nixon over John Kennedy in 1960 and one showing 1980 vice presidential candidate George H. W. Bush speaking in Leonard Auditorium.

Come by the library and take a look at some interesting artifacts from past political seasons.

The next several blog posts will be about orientation, student organizations, and events surrounding the opening of school each year.  About once a week, I try to post a document from the archives.  Today’s document is the welcome message to the freshmen of fifty years ago – in the fall of 1958 – the members of the Class of 1962. 

The student handbook of that era was called the “W” book and was published by the Student Christian Association.  It contained greetings from Wofford’s new president, Charles F. Marsh, along with SCA President A. V. Huff ’59, student body president Charles Bradshaw ’59, and Interfraternity Council President Jerry Richardson ’59, along with rules and regulations.  The handbook also contains the rules for “ratting,” which will be the subject of a future post.

Welcome to Wofford!  This phrase may seem a little trite to you by this time, but with it we wish to extend the warm and sincere greetings of the Student Christian Association to you, the Class of Sixty-Two.  For each of you there is a definite place waiting in the SCA.

As the first contribution to you for a successful college career, the SCA presents this handbook to guide you through these first excitingly new and important days.

There are many spills that can be avoided by simply reading and heeding some of the material within this small book.  Become familiar with the rules that apply to “ratting” since many of the initial blunders are caused by ignorance.  Every upperclassman is your friend.  If you want questions answered about ratting or college in general, just ask.

No doubt you have watched a child’s first efforts to walk.  When the child falls no one worries about it except the child himself.  So it is here at Wofford — it matters not that you fall but how you get up and push forward.

Whatever you accomplish here at Wofford will be the result of your own individual worth and effort.  Now you are on your own–away from home and life-long friends.  You must mold and guide your own life and work in college.  The result will be the sum total of effort that you put forth.  In short, your life here can be what you want it to be — success or failure — to any degree  The opportunities are here.  Rise and meet the challenge.

To the men in the Class of Sixty-Two who rise after falling and answer the challenge of Wofford — this book his humbly dedicated.

I mentioned earlier this summer that I’d likely be writing fewer blog posts this summer and that I’d also be talking a little more about some of our summer projects.

Many of you will recall that we’ve spent a tremendous amount of time on President Snyder’s papers.  Dr. Snyder was president from 1902 to 1942, the longest tenure in the college’s history, and he left behind some 45 cubic feet of records.  Because I’ve been working on his papers for several months, items from his papers have been the basis for several blog posts here.  We completed arranging and describing these papers earlier this month, and the finding aid, or guide to the collection, is available on the library website.  Snyder Papers Finding Aid.

We’ve moved to working on the papers of President Walter K. Greene, who served as president from 1942 to 1951.  Dr. Greene is the only alumnus to serve as president of the college.  His papers are not as voluminous – unprocessed, the are only about 15 cubic feet.  Part of the reason is his length of service was only a quarter that of Snyder, but part lies in the way the college was organized.  For much of Snyder’s tenure, his office handled many routine matters, and these simply wound up in his files.  During Greene’s presidency, other administrators handled most of these tasks.  However, there’s always plenty to learn from a president’s papers.  I hope to explore some of these topics in later blog posts.  Among the topics I expect to cover: the postwar development campaign, athletic success in the late 1940s, church relations, and the wartime takeover of the campus by the Army Air Corps.  When Greene is complete, we’ll have paper collections for all nine of Wofford’s former presidents.

We’re also working on scanning some of our Methodist ministerial directories.
The oldest three editions, from 1901, 1914, and 1932, respectively, are all valuable sources for local church historians, and all are both rare and increasingly fragile.  When local church historians ask for pictures of their ministers, we reproduce them from these books.  We’ve made high-quality scans of them, and over the next few months, will be exploring how to put these on the web.  We’ll also have volumes from 1942, 1952, and 1961 to work on later.  Also, we’ve scanned a few smaller photo collections and the campus buildings and grounds photos.  All of these will make showing and sharing the college’s documentary history easier.

Just to show an example of one of the items we’ve scanned, here’s an aerial view of the campus from 1963.  Click on the image for a larger version.  You can see Shipp Hall under construction in the upper middle portion of the picture, and the now-demolished Carlisle Hall in the lower middle part of the picture.