1890s Scrapbook of a Student at Mary Baldwin Seminary, Including Telegrams from Ft. D.A. Rusell, Wyoming.
United States: 1890s. Notebook measuring 7 ¾ x 10 inches, blue cloth, 100pp with nine separate loose pages. Spine missing and covers detached, wear and stains to boards, fair to good. Contents generally very good with few pages detached. Overall very good minus. Item #List3531
A scrapbook likely belonging to Mary Rieman Hack (1877–1928), a student at Mary Baldwin Seminary in Staunton, Virginia, in the late 1890s. The seminary, affiliated with the Presbyterian Church, was founded as Augusta Female Seminary in 1842. An early student, Mary Julia Baldwin, became its principal in 1863 and the school was renamed in her honor in 1895. The school was a prestigious secondary and finishing school for girls with attendees from all across the country, and is now the co-educational Mary Baldwin University.
The scrapbook includes recital programs and report cards—some calling the school Mary Baldwin and others Augusta—from 1895 to 1897. One recital included students performing “Exercises with Dumb-bells”—the seminary had a reputation as a healthy environment, with a swimming pool, tennis courts, and Dr. Dio Lewis’s calisthenics program.[1]
Mary Hack also wrote some original poetry about the college, including “Sky High”:
“There are four buildings in that seminary / Which is kept by one-eyed Mary, / Brick House is as they say ‘Small Hall’ / And the occupants think it best of all. / Hill Top is another and they say, / Hearing last year was very gay, / But nay! it looks like a jail / And is old, rickety and frail. / [...] Here lies the jolliest set in school / And none are by any means a fool / All laughing, happy girls, / With handsome figures and lovely curls. [...]”
Her other poems include “A Prophecy”, in which she imagines herself as an older woman and reminisces on her friends from Mary Baldwin. However, she also copied down a number of poems, some of which are surprisingly racy for a girl of her time, especially “The Keyhole in the Door,” which describes watching a young woman undress through a keyhole:
“Thought I ‘take off that chemise / I’ll ask for nothing more’ / Ye Gods! I saw her do it / Through the keyhole in the door.”
This poem appears in Gale Huntington’s Songs the whalemen sang (Barre Publishers, 1964), which documents New England whalemen’s songs.
Most of the scrapbook consists of newspaper clippings, especially jokes, illustrations, and comic poems—it is a cornucopia of late Victorian humor.
Also included in the scrapbook is a series of telegrams sent to and from Ft. D. A. Russell in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1897. The telegrams appear mainly to be coordinating a visit by Mary Hack to her friend Margaret Van Horn, daughter of Captain James Judson Van Horn. During the Civil War, Captain Van Horn had served as Assistant Provost Marshal General of the Army of the Potomac.
Of interest to historians both of women’s education before the turn of the century, and of that period’s humor.
[1] Mary Watters, The History of Mary Baldwin College 1842–1942 (Mary Baldwin College, 1942).
Price: $400.00
Status: On Hold