Archive for the 'Archives' Category

New Archives Exhibit: The Form Plaques of SPS

March 31st, 2011

As promised on Ohrstrom Blog just prior to March break, a new Archives online exhibit is now available on the Ohrstrom Library Digital Archives: The Form Plaques of St. Paul’s School: John Gregory Wiggins.

Eighteen images have been selected as the focus of the exhibit. Each image includes a description of the symbols employed in the plaque design and is written by the carver of the plaques, John Gregory Wiggins.  In addition to the individual entries in the exhibit you can take a quick overview of the plaques by viewing a slideshow of the images. The exhibit offers a great introduction to this School tradition, and helps to decipher some of the interesting imagery used to depict aspects of St. Paul’s School history.

A more detailed description of the Form plaque tradition begun by Fourth Rector Samuel Smith Drury and Wiggins can be read HERE.

You can also view a complete list of Form plaque images available on OLDA by clicking HERE.

Take a few minutes to browse through this latest addition to the OLDA collection and learn more about the history of the plaques that adorn the dining halls in the Upper.

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New on OLDA: Form Plaque Photos

March 3rd, 2011

The Ohrstrom Library Digital Archive – OLDA for short – has some new images available from the SPS Archives for online viewing. A series of photographs have been digitized featuring forty-two of the Form plaques on display in the Coit Upper Dining Hall. The first nine plaques from the Forms of 1859 through 1867 have been added to the website this week and include descriptions of the symbols present in the designs as described by the carver, John Gregory Wiggins.

Click HERE to see the images.

Wiggins was a teacher at St. Paul’s School from 1912 -1916, until he left to pursue a full-time carving career. Counted among his many ecclesiastical commissions are the carvings he created for the New Chapel – including the allegorical animals that adorn the pews in the choir room. Wiggins began carving Form plaques in 1921 and over the years he designed and carved the plaques for the Forms of 1858 through 1953.  These include all the plaques on display in the Coit Upper Dining Hall and the colorful heraldic shield plaques in the Upper Cloister.

More images will become available on OLDA over the next few weeks, and a selection of the images will be collected into an online exhibit with more detail on the history and tradition of the plaques.  Over time, images will be added of plaques carved by other artists that continued the tradition after Wiggins.

In addition, you can follow the process of the creation of the Form plaque for the Form of 2011, as documented in the SPS Form Plaque Project blog and SPS Form Plaque Project Facebook page. This project is the result of the Form of 1973 Mentor Fellowship awarded to me last spring, and I will be carving the plaque over the summer that will be displayed in the Coit Middle Dining Hall when completed.  Over the next few years I will be carving additional Form plaques for the missing years going back to 1991 so that a cherished school tradition begun ninety years ago by John Gregory Wiggins can continue into the future.

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From the Archives: Clearing the Ice

February 10th, 2011

This photo was discovered in the St. Paul’s School Archives in a box among some of  the older hockey photos.  It shows two teams of horses pulling equipment, with workers guiding the process.  Someone has penciled in “Planer” and “Scraper” under the teams, and on the back of the photo is written “L S Pond. Clearing the ice.” also in pencil.  There is no date on the photo or any identifying details to help date this image, but horses were used to clear and shave the ice at St. Paul’s in this way at least into the 1950s when the first artificial hockey rink was built.

Richard B. McAdoo, SPS Form of 1938, wrote this recollection in his Autumn 1991 Alumni Horae article:

Early on, though, we were taught that the way to cope with a New England winter is to seize hold of the sport it has to offer. Chief among these for us was hockey. Once the roads had been cleared of snow, the teams of horses were guided onto the School Pond, where the ice was two or more feet thick, to plough the drifts off the hockey rinks. A team was then hitched to the ingenious blade —it was first developed here —which shaved a thin layer off the ice and left it smooth as glass for the afternoon’s games. Learning to skate was taken as much for granted as knowing how to multiply and divide.

With all the snow that has fallen so far this winter it is difficult to imagine having to clear all the roads around SPS and enough of Lower School Pond to hold at least six rinks using teams of horses instead of snow plows and snow blowers.  Think about those horses and the workers next time you are skimming across the ice, and all the hard work that has gone into maintaining this long-standing tradition at St. Paul’s School.

Update – April 27, 2012: Here’s a link to a related PDF article -  Alumni Horae, Spring, 1957: The Pond in Winter

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From the Archives: The Cradle of American Hockey

January 5th, 2011

In celebration of Matthews Family Hockey Day on Saturday, January 8th, as well as the arrival of black ice and a beautiful outdoor hockey rink on Lower School Pond, Ohrstrom Library has on display in the Upper Level display cases an exhibit of historic photographs and materials from the SPS Archives entitled “St. Paul’s School : the Cradle of American Hockey.”

In St. Paul’s : the Life of a New England School, August Heckscher writes this of hockey at SPS:

At first it had been an informal scrimmage on the ice, gradually settling into a more organized contest with eleven men to a side, playing with a square piece of wood for a puck. In 1896, the Canadian version of the game, with seven players 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.

You are invited to take a moment upon your next visit to Ohrstrom Library to view this exhibit created with materials from the SPS Archives, in celebration of the long and illustrious history of hockey at SPS.

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The Year in Review: 1910

December 9th, 2010

The Record of 1910 and 1911, School publications covering the 1910-1911 academic year,  provide some insight into what student life was like one hundred years ago.  The Reverend Dr. Henry Ferguson was Rector, only the third Rector in the School’s then fifty-four year history.  Interestingly, Ferguson served as Rector from 1906 to 1911, a one-hundred year parallel to our current – and retiring – Rector, William R. Matthews, Jr.

In 1910, Kimball Studio of Concord took this photograph of the entire School.  The Record tells us that there were 328 students, all boys,  with 1.5% of them listed as coming from outside the United States.  In 2010, the students number 537, with a roughly equal portion of girls to boys,  and 18% coming from outside the U.S.

Club sports were a very large part of student life in 1910, and The Record is full of statistics from the various competition results. For example, in addition to the main SPS football team of eleven students (whose average weight, The Record informs us, was 165 lbs.), each of the Clubs – Isthmian, Old Hundred, and Delphian – had three football teams: First, Second and Third Elevens.  That must have made for a lot of football games!  The Isthmian First Elevens won the championship that year with a 4 – 0 record, scoring a total of 33 points. In 2010, the Club Cup was organized to help renew interest in the long tradition of Club spirit at St. Paul’s School.

One hundred years ago, on December 5th, The Record notes the first skating on School Pond, and two days later the last two hours of classes were given off as a skating holiday.  On December 8th, Long Pond was “entirely open for skating.” Although Lower School Pond has only a thin skim of ice today, it won’t be long before the rinks are set up and the sound of freshly sharpened skates scraping against the ice will be heard outside Ohrstrom Library.  For all the differences that have emerged over the last one hundred years, there are still some things that would be comfortingly familiar to the students of 1910.

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