The exact history of the album is a mystery. He kept flipping through the album, revealing one unique photo after another. “This is him in his prime, in his youth,” Healea says. In 1877, he was just four years into his tenure as president. The photographs of Warren that still exist tend to show him later in life, with a graying beard and receding hair. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he says. Then he opened the album and saw an unfamiliar image of BU’s first president, William Fairfield Warren, and immediately understood the significance of the album’s contents. When he saw “Class of ’77” embossed on the front cover, he assumed that meant 1977. “I’m sure I’m wrong about this, but I feel like I’ve read everything that’s ever been published about the University,” Healea says. ![]() Marsh, and has spent hours researching in the University’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center. He’s writing a book about BU’s fourth president, Daniel L. Healea, who’s worked at CAS for eight years, has an active interest in BU’s history. Something else caught his eye that day: the spine of a thick book with the word “Photographs” embossed across it. They hold financial reports, BU yearbooks, and miscellaneous artifacts like a ceramic BU plate and a brass microscope. ![]() Although he’d been there a dozen times before, he says, he had never studied what was in the cabinets and glass-covered bookshelves lining the walls. He arrived early and looked around the conference room. On September 14, 2022, Daryl Healea, CAS assistant dean for curriculum and enrollment services, was invited to a meeting in the CAS business office. In all, the album’s 62 pristine photographs provide a detailed look at a formative moment in the college’s history. The entire Class of 1877 is included, first as a series of portraits and then as a group, as are BU’s original buildings and lecture halls. Within its pages are some of the earliest known images of BU administrators and faculty-and in some cases, these are the only known images. There, on a conference room bookshelf, an 1877 photo album had been hiding in plain sight. But most details about the class were thought to be lost to time-until a remarkable discovery was made at the College of Arts & Sciences in 2022. The accomplishments of some would eventually lead to newspaper headlines, books, and ( much later) Wikipedia pages. Among them were future members of the clergy, educators, a judge, a bookseller, a lumber merchant, a best-selling author, and a leader of the women’s suffrage movement. By graduation, four years later, the Class of 1877 included 24 men and 8 women-a rarity in higher education at the time. Yet somehow, because it stood so still upon a dead branch, a great blue heron remained mostly obscured.The College of Liberal Arts’ first undergraduate class matriculated 150 years ago. And, truth be told, there were not that many trees, especially around the pond. I wonder if he noticed the beauty that lay at his feet? Her little boy threw rocks into the pond and up high into the trees. I saw one man teaching his young daughter how to draw. Tucked here and there, in open spaces and sometimes beneath the largest trees, sat families. But up high in a tree, more reluctant to be seen, sat a black squirrel.Īround grassy knolls we continued to walk. ![]() A chorus of gray squirrels chided Steve for not bringing them nuts. Mallards looked up at us wondering if we had a treat. So, the animals were quite used to people. In the middle of a bustling town the park was well-visited by local families. That same day, at an adjacent park, we walked around a pond and through the neighboring woods. Soon I found myself kneeling in the mud inching closer to this little fellow, whose photo I took for a friend who loves frogs. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something move. ![]() As Steve and I walked through a wooded area this past Sunday, something rustled the dried leaves at my feet.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |