{"id":1934,"date":"2017-05-08T20:16:44","date_gmt":"2017-05-08T20:16:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aulibrarynews.wordpress.com\/?p=1934"},"modified":"2017-05-08T20:16:44","modified_gmt":"2017-05-08T20:16:44","slug":"alan-littell-ruminations-on-local-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.alfred.edu\/aulibrarynews\/2017\/05\/08\/alan-littell-ruminations-on-local-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Alan Littell: Ruminations on Local History"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following article, by Alan Littell, appeared in a recent issue of The Alfred Sun<\/em>; it is reproduced here with his permission. Additional issues of The Alfred Student<\/a> are available in Alfred University’s institutional repository, AURA (Alfred University Research and Archives)<\/a>. Managed by the libraries, AURA collects, distributes and preserves research and scholarship created by faculty, staff and students, as well as documents of historical or archival significance.
\nRuminations on Local History: Alfred and its University, 1876<\/strong>
\nI recently stumbled on a curious publication. Housed in the archives of Alfred University and dated October 1876, the document\u2014The Alfred Student\u2014<\/em>is a hodgepodge of essays, exhortations, biblical allusions and paid advertisements. It has less the look of a campus newspaper, more of a literary magazine and journal of cultural and political opinion.
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In an image dating from the 1880s, Civil War veterans gather for Memorial Day parade on Alfred\u2019s Main Street.\u00a0<\/span><\/h5>\n

 
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\nThe Civil War was of recent memory. The American commonwealth found itself in the grip of novel societal forces as emancipated slaves migrated north and west. A progressive Republican from Ohio, Rutherford B. Hayes, trailed in the run for the presidency (he would win after a disputed Electoral College vote).
\nThe Alfred Student<\/em> was a sometimes sensitive, sometimes amusing mirror of its time, of its university and of the remote rural backwater, called Alfred Centre, where it was written, edited and set in type. \u00a0To get some idea of how people had actually lived in this particular place and age, we turn to the paper\u2019s ads.
\nThe range of goods and services then available included at least one that would be impossible to find locally today\u2014the repair of mechanical clocks and watches. But in 1876, a Main Street jeweler named Amos Shaw guaranteed that his corrective surgery on weight- or spring-driven timepieces would be \u201cdone in the best manner.\u201d Nearby, a variety store operated by a certain Silas Burdick advertised itself an embryonic Walmart. It sold books, shoes, wallpaper, lamps, toys, candy and drugs.
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Alfred and its university in the mid 1870s.\u00a0 White building in foreground is the Burdick Hotel.\u00a0 Dome of Alfred University\u2019s first astronomical observatory and the school\u2019s Greek-revival chapel\u2014now the admissions office (Alumni Hall)\u2014can be seen in the middle distance.<\/span><\/h5>\n

 
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\nThere were many Burdicks living at the time in Alfred, and a hotel proprietor of that name offered \u201cgood accommodations for both man and beast, terms reasonable.\u201d The Williams & Titsworth emporium, \u201cover Coon\u2019s Book Store, Alfred Centre,\u201d sold white shirts for $1, while Mrs. E.J. Potter, dealer in \u201cMillinery and Ladies\u2019 Furnishing Goods,\u201d on University Street, urged students and residents to \u201cplease call and examine.\u201d And in a village in which outhouses accounted for sanitary arrangements and wells for water, Burdick & Green\u2019s Hardware Store, on Main Street, stocked a supply of \u201ceavetroughs\u201d (roof gutters) to \u201cfurnish cisterns with good soft water\u201d while protecting \u201cwalls from being thrown down by water freezing against them, which is a source of great annoyance.\u201d
\nIn its editorial columns, The Alfred Student<\/em>\u2019s lead article extolled Alfred University\u2019s pioneering support for the cause of coeducational schooling. The piece argued that instead of \u201cshutting [a girl] apart\u201d or by teaching a boy that \u201crudeness and selfishness are manly qualities,\u201d joining them in the common enterprise of education resulted in \u201cnatural diversity and a richer character\u2014a quick perception of mutual proprieties, delicate attention to manly and womanly habits\u2026a higher and purer tone of morality.\u201d
\nElsewhere, the paper urged adoption of the metric system of measurement. We\u2019re told also that Dartmouth College had raised its tuition and that one of its faculty members, a Professor Dimond, \u201cdied of brain disease.\u201d At Alfred University, meanwhile, instruction was reported to be available in classical, scientific and teachers\u2019 courses as well as in theology, the school having been founded by the breakaway sect of New England Baptists who observed Saturday, rather than Sunday, as the biblically enjoined day of rest and worship. Also offered was course work in industrial mechanics and in the leading communications wonder of the era, telegraphy.
\nThe paper noted that tuition and \u201cincidentals\u201d came to $11 for each of the year\u2019s three academic terms: fall, winter and spring. Board was priced at $30 to $40, room $3 to $6. The school assessed students $3 to $6 for \u201cfuel\u201d and $2 to $3 for \u201cwashing.\u201d Mention was made that \u201crooms for ladies are furnished and carpeted\u201d and that off-campus housing could be obtained from private families
\nOne item jarred. It ran under the heading \u201cPlain Language Concerning a Recent Unpleasantness.\u201d A casual yet singularly stupid buffoonery of rhymed couplets, blatantly racist in idiom and tone, the piece had been reprinted\u2014without critical comment or disclaimer\u2014from Princeton\u2019s student newspaper, The Princetonian.<\/em>
\nIt later surfaced in another college publication, The Chronicle of the University of Michigan, as \u201cthe song of five juniors at Princeton who objected to having a colored man sit behind them in class.
\nWhat was so surprising about the item is that Alfred University and its Seventh Day Baptist founders had been in the forefront of agitation for ending slavery. The radical abolitionists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass had lectured at the school. Before and during the Civil War, local church members, historically associated with the cause of emancipation, aided runaway slaves escaping to Canada on the so-called \u201cunderground railroad.\u201d And in the spring of 1861, the nine male members of Alfred\u2019s senior class heeded President Lincoln\u2019s call for volunteers to fight for restoration of the Union. Moved by patriotism and religious fervor, they enlisted in two of the infantry regiments then forming in New York
\nIn their classic survey, \u201cThe Growth of the American Republic,<\/em>\u201d historians Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager contended that Lincoln\u2019s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation had been \u201cpotentially more revolutionary in human relations than any event in American history since 1776.\u201d The authors went on to say that the document had, in a very real sense, \u201clifted the Civil War to the dignity of a crusade.”
\nYet make no mistake. Emancipation may have ended slavery; it did not end the racism that grew out of slavery in a national polity undergoing the strains of post-war reunification
\n\u201cLincoln\u2019s own state of Illinois barred newly freed slaves from settling [there] in 1863,\u201d notes Gary Ostrower, professor of history at today\u2019s Alfred University
\n\u201cI\u2019d be surprised,\u201d he added, \u201cif some Alfredians\u2026were not influenced by popular racist attitudes during the post-war years.\u201d
\n– Alan Littell<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following article, by Alan Littell, appeared in a recent issue of The Alfred Sun; it is reproduced here with his permission. Additional issues of The Alfred Student are available in Alfred University’s institutional repository, AURA (Alfred University Research and Archives). Managed by the libraries, AURA collects, distributes and preserves research and scholarship created by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1954,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.alfred.edu\/aulibrarynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1934"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.alfred.edu\/aulibrarynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.alfred.edu\/aulibrarynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.alfred.edu\/aulibrarynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.alfred.edu\/aulibrarynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.alfred.edu\/aulibrarynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1934\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.alfred.edu\/aulibrarynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1954"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.alfred.edu\/aulibrarynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.alfred.edu\/aulibrarynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.alfred.edu\/aulibrarynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}