#TBT in the Archives 4/20/17: Herbaria

The warmer weather of spring brings picnics, baseball and frisbee games, and studying with friends outdoors to the Shippensburg campus. In the 1890s, spring also brought much-anticipated adventures in botany for Cumberland Valley State Normal School seniors. 

As a requirement of graduation, students in the elementary course had to take one term of botany under the guidance of Professor Joseph F. Barton. At the end of the class, they had to produce an herbarium of at least 40 species of plants. Shippensburg University Archives & Special Collections has six herbaria produced by Dr. Barton's students.

An herbarium by R.H. Cunningham includes an ornate cover lettered in gold ink.

What's an herbarium? In the case of CVSNS, it was a scrapbook of dried plants and specimens, and their descriptions. Descriptions included common and botanical names, and in some cases, where and when the students collected the plants. The projects were small-scale siblings to larger herbaria collected by scientists and large universities.

In this herbarium Dill Stevens, Class of 1899, arrayed Judas Tree specimens in the shape of a cross.

According to the CVSNS catalog, botany students were tasked with learning how to observe plant life in order to make identification on sight. To do this, botany classes took at least one exploratory excursion a week for field work. 

Mary Kerr Hays Main's herbarium includes botanical information about the blood root.

Several of the herbaria in the archives include listings of where the students found the plants. Locations listed include "Old Main Veranda," "C.V.R.R. tracks" or local farm fields identified by farmer. 

Wild carrot specimens included in Fannie Geiger's herbarium include the name of the field where she collected the specimen and the date of the collection.

Other herbaria include general habitat information where plants could be found. Although students were only required to include 40 specimens in their books, the Class of 1897 was reported to include between 60 and 70 in their collections.

Pampas Grass collected by Nellie Geiger specified the plant could be found in lowlands.

Each of the books is tied together with ribbon or cord, and includes dried, pressed specimens mounted on thick pages. The six books in the archives date from 1892 to 1899 and at 120-125 years old, many of them are in great shape, offering a fascinating look at class projects in the 1890s. In 2017, scientists are using historic herbaria to study the history of plants and how ecosystems have evolved or survived over time.

You can see herbaria as well as other scrapbooks from students of the past at Archives & Special Collections. Just make an appointment by emailing specialcollections@ship.edu.

Sources:
Cumberland Valley Normal School Catalog, 1888-1889.
Cumberland Valley Normal School Catalog, 1893-1894, 41.
Normal School Herald, Shippensburg, PA, July 1897, 28-29.

#TBT in the Archives 4/9/15

The rise of social media over the past decade may make it seem like everyone is their own digital curator by posting photos, favorite quotes, and daily musings on Facebook or Twitter. This week, we wanted to highlight a nostalgic medium that predates these personal online archives: the scrapbook. Archives & Special Collections has a collection of scrapbooks dating from 1891-1984, and we have selected a few to showcase for this edition of Throwback Thursday.

The origins of scrapbooking date back to the fifteenth century in Europe. Friendship books were popular between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, which were precursors to modern day yearbooks. In the scrapbooks of Shippensburg students, we can see that students put together photographs, programs, pamphlets, course curriculum documents, newspaper clippings, magazine cutouts, ticket stubs, letters, and other keepsakes of their college careers. The 1895 pages pictured above showcase a Cumberland Valley State Normal School (CVSNS) pin with the school colors of the time, programs from commencement and music performances, and a clipped article about the junior play, "Our Boys." The author of the scrapbook also includes some hand-written commentary. "Class yell hurra hurrah...for the class of XCV" expresses the enthusiasm for graduation. College scrapbooks reflect a sense of school spirit while documenting an individual student's college experience.

Scrapbook covers, from top left to bottom: 1895, 1943, and 1983

The pages from a 1983 scrapbook pictured above preserve the memories of the "Midnight Magic Jr.-Sr. Formal." A flyer for the dance is accompanied by ticket stubs and permit approval allowing the sale of tickets. A short news articles addressing the upcoming formal and the limited amount of tickets still for sale is also included. Student scrapbook creators filled the pages of these books not only to preserve their mementos from events, but to capture the ephemeral moments of college life that they wanted to remember.

University news clippings appeared frequently in later Ship scrapbooks, such as in these pages from 1983. Magazine cutouts and national newspaper headlines were a more modern scrapbook trend, pasted alongside university and local news.

Pressed flowers were another popular item preserved in scrapbooks, as seen in this scrapbook that was put together by Mary Kerr Hays Main in 1895. Mary may have created this scrapbook as a school project. She wrote the Latin and family names of the flowers next to each plant. This particular scrapbook represents Mary's love of flowers and gardening, an activity she enjoyed throughout her life, and also serves as a record of the local plant life in the Shippensburg area at the turn of the 20th century.

When it comes to scrapbooks, these items are truly unique primary sources and they provide an amazing amount of information, but we should remember that these personal perspectives are also very selective. Students chose to include photographs of certain friends and tickets from certain dances and exclude others. There was certainly a reason behind their choices, just as today we all make choices about what photos to share on Instagram and what news articles to retweet on Twitter. In the pre-Internet age, scrapbooks were one way for students to document and reinforce these social connections.

You might still be scrapbooking today! Scrapbooking remains a popular hobby. If you've created a scrapbook of your Shippensburg University experience that you would like to donate to Archives & Special Collections, contact us via e-mail: specialcollections@ship.edu or phone: 717-477-1516. We're here to to preserve your Ship history for future generations!


Sources consulted:
Good, Katie Day. "From Scrapbook to Facebook: A History of Personal Media Assemblage and Archives." New Media & Society 15, no. 4 (June 2013): 557-573.