Welcome back, students!

Here at the Champlain College Library, and across campus, we are looking forward to our students' return at the end of August. The College Archives contains many images documenting the annual ritual of move-in day, which has occurred on campus since our first dormitory, Jensen Hall, opened in 1965. Here are a couple of good shots from the recent past:

Unpacking the car, c. 1980, Champlain College Archives

Moving in to Rowell Hall, by Kathleen Landerwehrle, 1999, Champlain College Archives

(Check out the Gateway computer!)

Champlain's Ethan Allen Center

The history of Champlain's ETHAN ALLEN CENTER is featured in a new special collections exhibition in the lobby of Miller Information Commons. In 1857, a group of local businessmen founded the Ethan Allen Fire Engine Company No. 4, a volunteer firefighting and men's social organization. The Company drew its name from its first horse-drawn fire engine, dubbed the "Ethan Allen" in honor of the colonial leader of the Green Mountain Boys.

In 1889, the Company built a firehouse on Church Street, now Burlington City Arts' Firehouse Gallery. This postcard view from the early twentieth century shows the firehouse next to Burlington's old City Hall (which was replaced in 1928).

Postcard view of City Hall showing the Ethan Allen Firehouse in the background, c. 1910-1920
Llewellyn Collection of Vermont History, #2010.1.620

After a series of devastating fires in 1895, Burlington residents voted to form a paid Fire Department, rendering the city's volunteer firefighting companies, including the Ethan Allen Company, obsolete. The Ethans vacated their firehouse and reinvented themselves as the Ethan Allen Club, a purely social organization. By this time, the Club had about two hundred members, among them prominent businessmen, bankers, and politicians. In 1905, the Club purchased and renovated an elegant Greek Revival style house on College Street dating to 1834 for its new clubhouse. It contained reception and banquet rooms, a basement bowling alley, billiards room, and a caretaker's apartment.

Postcard view of the Ethan Allen Club at 298 College St., Eastern Illustrating and Publishing Co., postmarked 1917
Llewellyn Collection of Vermont History, #2010.1.477

In 1971, the clubhouse was destroyed by a fire caused by faulty electrical wiring. The Club immediately rebuilt the clubhouse, constructing a modern brick building:

The rebuilt Ethan Allen Club, detail of the front cover of History of the Ethan Allen Engine Company No. 4 (1982)
Llewellyn Collection of Vermont History, #2010.1.821

After the Club disbanded in 2008, Champlain College purchased the clubhouse for eventual redevelopment as student housing. In the meantime, the building has been reimagined as the Ethan Allen Center and is currently being used for as a pop-up museum showcasing student work.

Champlain College: Empowering Women Since 1878

NEW RESEARCH INTO THE EARLY HISTORY of Champlain College has revealed that the College has admitted women since its establishment in 1878. Champlain was founded as the Burlington Collegiate Institute and Commercial College, a private, for-profit school offering professional business training and college prep classes. An advertisement for the 1878-1879 school year boasts:  “This institution offers unsurpassed facilities to either sex to obtain a thorough education in either English commercial or classical branches, and prepare students also for any first-class college.”

A coed classroom at Champlain College (then known as the Burlington Business College), c. 1905
Courtesy Dean Howarth, Class of 1968

In the late 1870s, only about thirty percent of American colleges and universities admitted women. What is more, the very concept of higher education for women –much less coed higher education –was still very much a matter of debate. In 1873, only five years before Champlain was established, Boston physician Edward Clarke argued that higher education for women on a level equal to men’s should be discouraged, as rigorous intellectual activity would deplete their health and ability to have children. Clarke proposed that a separate, watered-down curriculum be designed for women.

Yet commercial colleges like Champlain College were a different beast than traditional four-year undergraduate institutions. They provided a comparatively short-term, economical, and practical course of study that primarily attracted students from the lower and middle classes. Starting in the 1840s, hundreds of commercial colleges were established across the country as the growing economy led to an increased demand for office workers trained in bookkeeping, penmanship (for legible business correspondence), stenography (shorthand), and later, typing and telegraph and telephone operation. Commercial colleges appealed to many nontraditional students seeking entry into the developing clerical field:  young men with limited means or education, veterans returning from military service, workers aspiring to move up the career ladder, and, by the 1870s, women who needed to earn a living.

Office work, particularly entry-level secretarial positions, provided new professional opportunities for women – appealing alternatives to the primary occupations open to them for much of the nineteenth century: domestic service, sewing, textile machine operation, and teaching. As a result, female students were an important demographic for commercial colleges, most of which were coed by the 1870s.

Illustration from a 1916 Champlain College [Burlington Business College] brochure
Champlain College Archives

Female enrollment in commercial colleges increased dramatically in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, mirroring the growing acceptance of women stenographers, typists, and bookkeepers. Nationally, 15% of commercial college students were female in 1882, and that had risen to 34% by 1898. In 1885, the earliest year for which Champlain’s enrollment details are known, only 9 out of 62 students, or 14.5%, were women. In 1898, 41 out of 98 Champlain students, or 42%, were female. It is clear that in the late nineteenth century, Champlain offered important educational opportunities for women, empowering them to enter the business world and begin to chip away at its glass ceiling. 

- Erica Donnis, Special Collections Director

Children’s Bibliotherapy Display

Children’s books aren't always humorous – the books on display on the 3rd Floor of MIC demonstrate that children’s literature can also be powerfully healing for young ones who have experienced a difficult event. This beautiful collection showcases some of the library’s picture books about divorce, loss, adoption, illness, and unexpected change. To learn more about bibliotherapy, visit http://bibliotherapy.ehs.cmich.edu/ or come talk with a Reference Librarian!

Second Annual Edible Books Festival!

These books are literally delicious

Swing by the main floor of the library this Wednesday, April 1st from Noon-3:30pm for the second annual Edible Books Festival! 

The Edible Books Festival an international, multi-media, participatory creative event which invites us all to a “world banquet where delicious, surprising bookish foods will be consumed.” Playful and provocative, the festival explores the integration of food with “text, literary inspiration or, quite simply, the form [of the book].” 

You can vote for your favorite and eat the books and other snacks at the serving celebration at 3pm! 

Prizes will be awarded in the following categories: 

• Prettiest 
• Punniest 
• Best Biblically Themed (in honor of the St. John's Bible)
• People’s Choice

Want to know more about edible books? Check out these links: http://www.books2eat.com/ and http://www.books2eat.com/index.php?page=albums. 

To see last year's entries check out our Facebook Album. 

Contact Stephen Wehmeyer with any questions. Bon Appetit!

Getting Around Town (and other places): How the People of Burlington Travelled

A new Special Collections exhibit has been set up at Roger H. Perry Hall depicting three main ways of travel in, around, and through Burlington, Vermont.

The most popular way to travel back in Burlington’s earlier days was by steamboat. It’s no surprise that mode of transportation was a huge hit because of Burlington’s location right on Lake Champlain. The most famous steamboat to run on the lake was the Ticonderoga, built in 1906, but sadly went out of business in 1950s due to more efficient ways to travel and has since retired to the Shelburne Museum.

Postcard of Steamship Ticonderoga docked in Burlington by Jesse Sumner Wooley, postmarked 1908
Llewellyn Collection of Vermont History, 2010.1.663

Another popular way to go from one place to another was by train. Even though the routes were mainly used for lumber transportation from the 1850s to the early 1900s, travelers used the Union Depot's services to travel from Burlington to other places in Vermont and New York. About fifty years later the Union Depot was replaced by the Union Station, built in 1915, and continued to carry passengers until passenger train service was discontinued in 1953.

Postcard of newly-completed Union Station by Charles H. Bessey, c. 1914-1915
Llewellyn Collection of Vermont History, 2010.1.664

The most recent way of transport introduced to Burlington is flight service. The Burlington Municipal Airport opened in 1920 and began to expand a few years later when flying became more popular. In
1960, the name was changed to the Burlington International Airport by the Board of Alderman, the
airport received its first commercial flight client, and more flights started to come in.

Stop by the postcard alcove at Roger H. Perry Hall to learn more about Burlington’s fascinating ways of transportation from the Llewellyn Collection of Vermont History.

-Adrian Taul, Class of 2018

Wells, Richardson, & Company: Master Advertisers

WELLS, RICHARDSON & COMPANY ranks as one of Burlington's most successful businesses ever. A new Special Collections exhibition in the historic conference rooms of Roger H. Perry Hall, on view through May 2015, profiles the company, its products, and its adept advertising methods. 

Founded in 1872, the pharmaceutical firm produced medicines, infant formula, fabric dyes, and other household products. By 1894, Wells, Richardson had $2 million in annual sales (some $51 million in today’s dollars), employed more than 200 people at its Burlington manufacturing plant and offices, and had branches in London, Montreal, and Sydney. 

Bottling Paine's Celery Compound at the Wells, Richardson manufacturing plant between College and Main Streets, from Burlington in Brief, c. 1890 (Llewellyn Collection #2010.1.456)

Wells, Richardson was a master of advertising, offering free samples, a satisfaction guaranteed policy, consumer testimonials, and cutie-pie images of babies and kids, among other techniques. The company's print department churned out hundreds of free publications designed to appeal to its target audiences, all of them loaded with product ads. This booklet containing a sentimental tale illustrated with sweet little girls, targeted female consumers in the market for fabric dyes such as the company's "Diamond Dyes":

Diamond Dyes: A Tale of Four Children Merry & Wise 

Wells, Richardson & Co., 1904 (Local History Collection #2014.15.1)

Stop by Perry Hall Rooms 274 and 271 to view these items from Champlain's Special Collections, and plenty more, in person.