• New Archives Online Exhibit: The Rectors of SPS

    02Mar

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    By Lisa Laughy - Library Web Services
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    Ohrstrom Library is pleased to announce the addition of a new archives online exhibit: The Rectors of St. Paul’s School.

    Since its founding in 1856, St. Paul’s School is fortunate to have enjoyed strong leadership in its Rectors.  The Rectors exhibit in the Archives section of Ohrstrom Library’s website presents the succession of these leaders through photographs and short biographies, and serves as a brief introduction to the fascinating history of leadership at St. Paul’s School.

    Much of the text and perspectives shared in the brief biographies that accompany photographs of the Rectors were drawn directly from two authoritative and well-loved volumes about St. Paul’s School: A brief history of St. Paul’s School, 1856-1996 by August Heckscher (located in Ohrstrom at: 373 Sa2H) and St. Paul’s School, 1855 – 1934 by Arthur Stanwood Pier (located in Ohrstrom at: 373 Sa2). In addition to reading these two volumes, you can find even more fascinating detail on each of the Rectors by searching the Alumni Horae digital archive, accessible online by clicking HERE.

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  • Reflections from the Horae: Ohrstrom Library, 1991

    03Jun

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    By Lisa Laughy - Library Web Services
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    Lisa Laughy – Archives Assistant

    The following is an excerpt from an article found in the Alumni Horae Digital Archive, now available online.  The Spring 1991 issue of the Alumni Horae celebrated the then newly completed and dedicated Ohrstrom Library.  In her article, The Libraries of St. Paul’s School, Librarian Rosemarie Cassels-Brown wrote her reflections on the place Ohrstrom Library would fill in this ongoing history:

    On a cold, sunny, but as yet snowless January day, just after the School returned from Christmas vacation, a colorful line of students and faculty, clad in parkas and heavy winter coats, stretched across from Sheldon to Ohrstrom. Piles of books were handed along, to be placed on the shelves in our new library. Conversations in the line were animated; the mood was one of celebration. . . . Although in terms of the number of books moved in this fashion it was a largely symbolic gesture, to those participating in the book brigade it meant: this is our library, . . .

    I sometimes wonder, as I move through this extraordinary building or take visitors around, what those who dedicated so much of their time and energy to the library in the early years of the School would think if they could see our new Ohrstrom Library —a spacious building, full of light, where students and teachers can pursue serious research as well as read for pleasure; . . . I hope our predecessors might be persuaded that in spite of much that would be new or unfamiliar to them, we are still concerned to be “an effective agency in the literary culture of the [students].”

    To read the full article click HERE to access the Alumni Horae Digital Archive, then under the “Browse” tab, in the “1990 – 1999″ folder, look for the “Spring 1991″ folder for The Libraries of St. Paul’s School article in that edition of the Alumni Horae.

    Article Source:

    Cassels-Brown, Rosemarie. “The Libraries of St. Paul’s School.” Alumni Horae
    Spring 1991: 16. Alumni Horae Digital Archive. Ohrstrom Lib., St. Paul’s
    School, Concord, NH. 2 June 2009 <http://archives.sps.edu/>.

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  • Alumni Horae Digital Archive Launch

    29May

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    By Lisa Laughy - Library Web Services
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    Lisa Laughy – Archives Assistant

    Ohrstrom Library is proud to announce a special Anniversary Weekend preview of the newly launched Alumni Horae Digital Archive.

    Alumni Horae, the St. Paul’s School alumni magazine, is published four times a year by the Alumni Association in order to engage the alumni community of SPS, to connect alumni to each other, and to enrich the School community. The magazine contains alumni news, features, book reviews, Form notes, and obituaries as well as information about current School life and athletics.

    The entire print run of the St. Paul’s School alumni magazine, has been scanned and is now accessible online. Every issue of the Alumni Horae from 1921 to the present has been professionally scanned using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to create a searchable online database.  The articles are also available in PDF format, which reproduces every page of the Alumni Horae as it was originally published, including all diagrams, tables, and photographs.  The PDF files are available for downloading and printing.

    Click HERE to access the Alumni Horae Digital Archive.

    Click HERE to access the user’s guide to searching and browsing the archive.

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  • Postcards from the Past: SPS Historic Postcard Exhibit

    15May

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    By Lisa Laughy - Library Web Services
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    Lisa Laughy - Archives Assistant

    The Historic Postcard online exhibit has now been updated to reflect the redesign of the Ohrstrom Library website.  Originally created in 2006, the exhibit has a new look as well as some new features.

    Here is a description of the exhibit excerpted from the “About” page:

    The SPS Historical Postcard exhibit presents images of St. Paul’s School from the late 1800s to the present. The scenes and buildings depicted by these postcards provide glimpses of the School as it has grown and changed over the decades. Images of vanished buildings, unfamiliar perspectives on buildings still in service, and of the School’s changing landscape (for example, the School’s stately elm trees from the days before Dutch Elm disease) offer an evocative mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar, and invite us to view the School today with a fresh perspective.

    The exhibit contains 79 postcard images gathered from the SPS Archives and loaned by friends of St. Paul’s School.  It includes individual pages for each postcard and a slideshow of all 79 postcard images.  Images are of vistas of years past, including familiar as well as “vanished” buildings.

    Read more about the Postcard Exhibit HERE.

    Access the Postcard Exhibit Galleries and Slideshow HERE.

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  • From the Archives: Hockey on Lower School Pond

    26Jan

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    By Lisa Laughy - Library Web Services
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    Lisa Laughy – Archives Assistant

    SPS Students on Lower School Pond, Jan. 2009. Photo by Jana Brown.

    One of the benefits of colder temperatures is thicker ice on Lower School Pond.  Workers have carefully cleared the surface of the pond behind Ohrstrom Library and have set up nets and backboards for playing ice hockey.  St. Paul’s School has a long and honored relationship with the sport, especially considering that SPS is credited as being the birthplace of hockey in the United States.  Those first hockey games played in the early 1880s took place on the same pond as today, and that connection is maintained each winter when SPS students put skates to the ice on Lower School Pond.

    There are a great number of images in the SPS Archives that document the history of hockey at the school.  SPS Archivist David Levesque has assembled a select display of Archive materials in the lower level case located outside the Writing Lab.  Take a moment to view the display next time you are in Ohrstrom.

    Below are a few examples of images featured in the Sesquicentennial online exhibit:

    Hockey Rinks on Lower School Pond

    “Seven rinks and two practice rinks are seen on the Lower School Pond. The first ice hockey game in the United States was played at St. Paul’s on the Lower School Pond. The game was imported from nearby Quebec. The Athletic Association made the rules in 1884: eleven players on a side and goal posts to be ten feet apart. The puck was then called the “block.” Sportswriters called St. Paul’s “the cradle of American hockey” under the guidance and coaching of Malcolm K. Gordon of the Form of 1887 and faculty 1889-1917.”

    Hockey Team

    “An early hockey team poses on the ice with coach Malcolm Kenneth Gordon, Form of 1887, and a Master 1889-1917. Sportswriters called St. Paul’s “the cradle of American hockey” under the guidance and coaching of Malcolm Gordon, who coached such famed hockey players as Hobey Baker, who attended SPS from 1903-1910.”

    Hockey Game on Lower School Pond

    “Hockey as we know it was first played in the United States right here on Lower School Pond. It was imported from Canada in the 1880s when the Rev. James P. Conover (Master 1882-1915) visited Montreal. As he wrote in a letter, “I got sticks, pucks (wooden tubes covered with leather) and rules from Canada myself. We flooded the field just below the dam with a few inches of water so we had safe and early skating, and when it snowed we flooded over the snow…this worked beautifully till the ice got so thick it thawed out from the ground and floated, so we put teams on the pond…at first you may remember we marked the boundaries by beams laid on the ice…it must have been somewhere about 1885. Malcolm Gordon was another of the early hockey enthusiasts.” At first it had been an informal scrimmage on the ice, gradually settling into a more organized contest with eleven men to a side. In 1896 the Canadian version of the game, with seven men on each side, was adopted. That same year the school team played for the first time on the fabled St. Nicholas rink in New York against a group of alumni. The alumni won 3-1. But the encounter was a spectacular event, and the school was off upon a long career of hockey playing, which was to make it known in the sports world and to fill many of the places on the top college teams with skaters trained upon the Millville ice.”

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  • From the Archives: The Big Study Fire of 1961

    21Jan

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    By Lisa Laughy - Library Web Services
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    Lisa Laughy -Archives Assistant

    Forty eight years ago tonight The Big Study mysteriously caught fire and burned to the ground.  The Big Study was located across from the Rectory between the Old and New Chapels, and was connected to the New Chapel by a cloister walkway.  It was built in 1872-1873 and was enlarged in 1888, making it one of the older buildings still in existence on School grounds at that time.

    The following description of the event is from August Heckscher’s book, A Brief History of St. Paul’s School (pgs. 134-135; Ohrstrom Call # 373 Sa2HB):

    “The night of January 21, 1961, was one of the coldest in New Hampshire’s twentieth century history, twenty-five degrees below zero.  That evening the school was gathered in Memorial Hall, absorbed in a film, Shake Hands with the Devil.  In the Big Study a lone master, the art teacher Bill Abbe, was in his apartment.  He noticed smoke rising through the hall outside.  He knocked at the doors of the few apartments carved from the labyrinth of old classrooms; finding no one there, nor anywhere else in the building, he called the fire department, gathered a few of his belongings, and made for the outdoors . . .

    It was already too late to save the building.  Firemen battled against the insuperable odds of sub-zero temperatures, the water from their hoses freezing into grotesquely-formed icicles, while the interior became an inferno.  Late in the night, flames creeping unseen through a vault of the adjacent cloister were discovered by one of the boys, who, by giving the alarm, undoubtedly saved the chapel.  Awed by the fury of the conflagration, students, faculty, and all the school community stood silently in the arctic cold.”

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  • Martin Luther King, Jr. Display at Ohrstrom Library

    15Jan

    Categories: Archives, Library News Click Here To Comment: 1 Comment

    By Lisa Laughy - Library Web Services
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    Lisa Laughy – Archives Assistant

    Ohrstrom Library marks the upcoming Martin Luther King, Jr. Day remembrance with a look into the St. Paul’s School Archives.  SPS Archivist, David Levesque has assembled a display of books about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement combined with related Archives materials from the history of St. Paul’s.  The display is on view in the Baker Reading Room starting today and will be available through the end of the month.  Be sure to give yourself a few minutes to look over the materials on display and see how the day has been observed at SPS in years past.

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  • Gone But Not Forgotten: The Vanished Buildings of SPS

    07Jan

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    By Lisa Laughy - Library Web Services
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    Lisa Laughy – Archives Assistant

    On first seeing the St. Paul’s School grounds it is easy to believe that it has always looked the same – there is a timeless feeling to the architecture here.  So it can be quite surprising when looking through photographs from the Archives to see just how much things have changed in Millville since the first classes were held in the spring of 1856.  So much has changed architecturally at St. Paul’s that Ohrstrom staff created an online exhibit a number of years ago documenting the buildings that have vanished from common memory.

    The Vanished Buildings of St. Paul’s School online exhibit has now been updated to reflect the redesign of the Ohrstrom Library website.  It features nearly fifty images and maps from the SPS Archives covering over a century and a half of St. Paul’s School history.  By browsing through the exhibit, you catch a glimpse of a past that offers up a very different collection of buildings from what you see on the grounds today.

    For instance, you will discover that your favorite expanse of lawn for tossing a Frisbee was once a crowded cluster of brick buildings connected by a cloistered walkway.  Also, while we all know that Coit is called “The Upper”, doesn’t it make more sense knowing that there was once a “Lower”?

    While looking through the redesigned online exhibit try to imagine what it was like to be a student here in years past.  Walking through School grounds may take on a different look and feel when seen through the lens of these old images.

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  • New Archives Online Exhibit: The Roll of Honor

    10Nov

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    By Lisa Laughy - Library Web Services
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    Lisa Laughy -Archives Assistant

    A new St. Paul’s School Archives online exhibit has been created making two publications available to read online through the Ohrstrom Library Website. The Roll of Honor: St. Paul’s School in the Great War and The Roll of Honor: St. Paul’s School in World War II reproduces two out-of-print and hard to find books originally published by the SPS Alumni Association: St. Paul’s School in the Great War (published in 1926) and St. Paul’s School in the Second World War (published in 1950).  The books contain short biographies of St. Paul’s Alumni who fought and gave their lives in the two World Wars.  The online exhibit contains direct scans of the pages from the books which have been converted into PDF files for easy reading online.  The two exhibits together contain one hundred and fifty two short biographies of St. Paul’s Alumni.

    Visit the online exhibit:

    The Roll of Honor: St. Paul’s School in the Great War, 1914-1918

    The Roll of Honor: St. Paul’s School in the Second World War

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  • From the Archives: Millville Memories on Display

    19Sep

    Categories: Archives Click Here To Comment: 0 Comments

    By Lisa Laughy - Library Web Services
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    David Levesque - Technical Services Librarian / Archivist

    From the earliest days, almost from the School’s founding in 1856, members of the SPS community have documented their lives and the life of the School through diaries, letters and memoirs. The SPS Archives holds many examples of this living history, giving us a glimpse into the School as it was and as it has evolved over the years. The Rural Record, for example, is a daily handwritten journal begun in 1857 and continued by various faculty members for almost fifty years.  The daily happenings of the School, both momentous and mundane, including the temperature and weather conditions taken at three different times of day, were recorded in these journals.

    Rectors and faculty members also kept personal diaries. For instance, Willard Scudder, Form of 1885, kept diaries that span almost his entire life, from 1893 up to his death in 1936, after forty-three years of devoted service to the School. We are fortunate that student letters from the past have also survived, such as the letters of George Farnam Brown, Form of 1906, who wrote home almost every week while he was a student at SPS from 1903 to 1906. Many SPS graduates have also written memoirs of their SPS experience. One notable example is Black Ice by Lorene Cary, Form of 1974.

    No matter the format, these writings allow us to experience the SPS of the past and serve to give us a deeper understanding of the history and traditions that have shaped SPS today. These diaries, letters and memoirs remind us of the love and labor of those who came before us who cared deeply for the School, and who wished to preserve their memories of Millville. We are in their debt for capturing in words the past that informs us today.

    See the new archives display - Millville Memories: Diaries, Letters and Memoirs from the SPS Archives – in the upper level gallery of Ohrstrom Library.

    See the complete letter shown above – including transcription, on the Ohrstrom Library Archives website HERE.

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