Smith was born on August 4th, 1845 in East Livermore, Maine. He was a graduate of Connecticut Wesleyan in 1871. He was later the head of the Montpelier Seminary in Vermont. Smith was an instructor at Wesleyan for two years and then went to Europe. He was elected president in 1898 and served until 1905.
Wilder graduated from Illinois Wesleyan University in 1873, and was the first alumni to become president of the institution. He was born in Greenfield, Illinois on July 7th, 1849. Wilder worked on a farm as a boy and later taught “country school.” He held pastorates in five Illinois towns and was presiding elder of the Decatur district at age 34.
Adams was president of Illinois Wesleyan from 1875-1888. He attended the preparatory department of Northwestern University and was licensed to preach by the age of 19, serving as a student pastor in Chicago. He enlisted in the Civil War in 1863 and within a year was elected lieutenant. Adams organized the first company of African Americans and was later promoted to captain and then to major. After resigning from the military, he went to study at Garrett Biblical Institute and graduated in 1870.
Fallows was born in England and immigrated to Wisconsin with his family in 1848 where he joined the Methodist Church at the age of 19. He studied at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin and at the University of Wisconsin. He was the Vice-President and Principal of Galesville University for two years, joined the Union Army in 1862, and served as the chaplain for the 32nd Wisconsin Infantry. He was also a Professor-elect of Natural Sciences at Lawrence and later a superintendent. He became president of Illinois Wesleyan University in 1873.
In 1874 he established a non-resident degree program that awarded Ph.B, M.A., and Ph.D.’s to “professional men and women whose duties and environments are such as to make a resident course of study an impossibility.” (See pp. 38-39 of An historical sketch of the Illinois Wesleyan University, together with a record of alumni: 1857-1895). This was the first-ever distance education program in the United States and it ended in 1910.
Munsell was born in Ohio in 1825. He graduated from Indiana Asbury University and then later studied law and was admitted to the bar. He served as the principal at two different seminaries and was the president of Illinois Wesleyan University from 1857 – 1873.
Sears was the first official president of Illinois Wesleyan University and served from 1855 until 1857. He was born in New York in 1820 but spent most of his life in Ohio. He graduated from Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1841. Before his presidency, he held the dual position of librarian and Professor of Ancient Languages and Literature.
According to the 1998-99 President’s Report*, one notable contribution Sears made was ensuring there was a “‘substantial sidewalk’ linking the school and town. Sears noted that when it rained, the roads became so muddy it was impossible to get into town from the school ‘out in the country.’ In fact, he was so determined to connect Illinois Wesleyan with the growing community of Bloomington that he spent $500 of his own money to build the sidewalk.”
*Quoted from “Part 1-The Beginning,” One Building, One Sidewalk: 1850-2000, Past is Prologue. 1998-99 President’s Report, A Sesquicentennial Preview (p. 5). University Archives Record Group 5-2/7.
Last spring, our archives was selected for participation in a digitization project sponsored by the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI). I chose the IWU Catalogue of Courses from 1851-1954 for this project, and it just went live as the 200th collection added to CARLI’s digital collection database for member libraries.
The Main building at IWU, shown in the 1876-77 Catalogue available at http://collections.carli.illinois.edu/cdm/ref/collection/iwu_catalog/id/8885
Course catalogs may not seem like the most compelling artifacts to have available online, but they have a lot to tell us about changes in personnel and physical attributes of campus, not to mention the curriculum!
A little known fact about these sources is that up until 1954, our catalogs contained an “enrolled” student list for the range of degree and certificate programs being offered.
So from the standpoint of the kinds of questions people direct to the archives, a significant benefit of this effort is that our last large collection of print material needed for finding people associated with IWU is now searchable!
Of course, all of the originals and the more recent catalogs, from 1955-present, are available in print in the University Archives.
From the 1941-43 Catalog available at http://collections.carli.illinois.edu/cdm/ref/collection/iwu_catalog/id/7456
For this project, CARLI worked with the Internet Archive, a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization to make these materials freely available to CARLI libraries and the world, through the Internet Archive at https://archive.org/details/carli_lib.
You can access our catalogs there or though the CARLI-hosted search interface. The smaller collection I created through CARLI makes it easy to search just our collection rather than having ours along with the millions of items already in the Internet Archive.
Find out more ways to research IWU history through the page of sources I created or by contacting me!
Guest posted by Melissa Mariotti
IWU West Gate. Photo copied from IWU Website.
As most students and faculty know, there are several main entrances into Wesleyan’s campuses. There is the North entrance on Franklin Avenue, the South entrance by Empire Street, the East entrance by Park Street, and the West entrance by Main Street. There is not much known about the latter entrance. It stands between Pfieffer and Gulick Halls and bears the inscription:
“We stand in a position of incalculable responsibility to the great wave of population overspreading the valley of the Mississippi. Destiny seems to point out this valley as the depository of great heart of the Nation. From this center mighty pulsations, for good or evil, must in future flow, which shall not only affect the fortunes of the Republic but reach in their influence other and distant Nations of the earth.”
The West Gates, looking north toward the Women’s Dormitory. From a 1931 booklet of pen sketches of Illinois Wesleyan University; RG 4-16/2/4.
Upon further research, it was discovered that the gates were ”erected and presented to the school by the Bloomington Association of Commerce in 1921” (Founders’ Day Convocation, 1999). There are two differing theories about where this quote came from. According to the 1960 Wesleyana, it is “an excerpt from the report on education to the annual meeting of the Illinois Conference held in Springfield in 1854.” But according to an Argus article from February 13th, 1940, it was said on December 18th, 1850 from the “Conference Record.”
The quote (see image below) was verified in the Methodist Conference Record of 1854 by the archives that holds the Conference Record for 1854: The Illinois Great Rivers Conference Archives at MacMurray College, Jacksonville, Illinois. There is more to the quote than was summarized on our West Gates, but the spirit of the passage resonates just as much today as it did for our Founders.
Students around the West Gate in 1951. From the 1951 Wesleyana.
The quote that is inscribed on the gate is said to represent “the ‘incalculable responsibility’ the founders of Illinois Wesleyan felt in the work they had undertaken” in establishing Illinois Wesleyan as an “institution of learning” (President Wilson, Founder’s Day Convocation Remarks, 2006). It describes the passion that the Founders had for teaching and learning, along with the many obstacles they had to face into creating the school. This inscription is referenced many times during Founders’ Day Convocations, and is evident in the care and consideration of all who work to sustain and advance that goal today.
Education Committee Report, 1854 Central Illinois Conference Journal
The text is as follows: “The Methodist Church, in the West and Southwest, stands in a position of incalculable responsibility to the great wave of population overspreading the valley of the Mississippi. Destiny seems to point out this valley as the depository of the great heart of the nation. From this center mighty pulsations, for good or evil, must in future flow, which shall not only affect the fortunes of the republic, but reach in their influence, other and distant nations of the earth. The advances herein reported which are being made by the Methodists on the subject of education in the bounds of the Illinois Conference, flatter the idea that, in so far as our section of the church is concerned and especially the division of it embraced in the Illinois Conference, cheering success will attend our future efforts to contribute our share towards the general education of the great masses. In addition to all other motives conspiring to lead us forward in this noble work, patriotism or the love of country is not the least. The nature of our constitutions and laws demands it. The tenure and price of our liberties are involved in it. The sovereignty invested in the whole people imperiously requires it; and recent events, as they have been connected with the civil questions which have agitated the nation, some of which questions have sprung from the tide of foreign emigration setting in upon American soil, call loudly for the work of education to go forward-the education of nothing less than the whole American mind; an education, too, that shall be American in all its essential principles.”
Let’s all admit it, archivists may think they’re speaking English but a lot of our terminology sounds like gibberish (MPLP, anyone?) or is industry-specific (e.g., archival value vs. legal value) or can just be misunderstood due to other, non-industry usages (e.g., appraisal–it’s not always about monetary value or processing–we’re not using it in the psychotherapy sense!). Every profession has its unique vocabulary and this post is about an unusual twist to a word that’s used in my profession but not easily understood: recordness.
I subscribe to several professionally-oriented listservs, and one that just started a year or so ago is something the Society of American Archivists calls the “Word of the Week.” It’s all part of an effort by a team of SAA members to enhance professional understanding via standardized terminology. This will culminate in a dictionary of terms used in archives and builds on the amazing work of the original “Glossary of Archival Terms” which can be found at http://archivists.org/glossary.
“What kinds of records do you keep” is a common question, and even more “Why isn’t something like a database considered a record?” There seems to be a lot of confusion about the kinds of things that are official records. I created a blog post about them last year and used an image adapted from another archives to illustrate document lifecycles.
How to tell if something is a record in the archival sense of the word. [click to enlarge]
n. ~ the quality of being a record; the state of having the characteristics of a record
Related Term
record
Notes
The definition of “recordness,” just as the definition of “record,” changes according to purpose, law, and context, yet there are some features that most archivists agree are defining features of a record: a record preserves the content of some human action or activity, its content is fixed, and it encompasses at least some of the context needed to make it comprehensible beyond itself. However, meaning is pliable in both the content and the definition of a record. Especially with regard to electronic records, for example, fixity is more a property of ensuring that a record does not change over time after capture by an archives rather than the property that a record (say, in the form of a database or a webpage) does not change during its active use.
Cited In
Bearman, David, “The Implications of Armstrong v. Executive of the President for the Archival Management of Electronic Records,” The American Archivist 56 (Fall 1993): 679.
Gilliland, Anne J., Conceptualizing 21st-Century Archives (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2014): 170.
Williams, Caroline, “Chapter 1: Records and archives: concepts, roles and definitions,” in Caroline Williams, ed., Archives and Recordkeeping: Theory into Practice (London: Facet Publishing, 2013): 14.
Periodically, people go through attics and storage boxes and send items to the archives that are related to IWU history. Sometimes amazing finds arise from the people who take time to send them “home.”
Just today I opened a box that held Student Senate Minutes dated May 17, 1970…how timely! On May 4 of this month, we took part in a commemorative event for the 45th anniversary of the Kent State killings in 1970. Documentation for events on our campus that were recounted in that blog post were limited to the Argus, Wesleyana and a few photographic files.
While researching that event, I marveled to discover that the IWU archives holds no Student Senate meeting minutes from March 22, 1970 until January 10, 1971.
It sure would help us appreciate the Senate’s actions if we had the primary sources they created to consult! Don’t get me wrong, the news sources are great to have, but it’s these kinds of gaps that make anyone doing historical research a little crazy.
So yes, it was good to see minutes in a recent donation, but it was a huge letdown to find that pages 2-15 of those minutes had been removed. We may never know why that happened, but on the very last page there is evidence that helps us understand a little more about the May 1970 student reactions in that turbulent month. The first image below was scanned from the minutes and it contains an announcement that the Black Student Union was responsible for the walkout. From this brief note, we also find out why they felt compelled to walkout 14 days after Kent State.
There was also a green flyer (image below) that explains the Peace Symbol students wore during Commencement in 1970–that event was also described in the previous post on the May 4th commemoration. These kinds of documents connect us with our past in tangible ways…stop by the archives if you want to see the real things someday!
Think you can’t make a difference? There’s only one way to find out…if you ever come across Senate records — or other records from IWU — give me a call! (309-556-1538)
And here’s a catchy little phrase to help reinforce the point:
When in doubt, don’t throw it out!
[click on images to enlarge]
5×7″ flyer stating reason for wearing the peace symbol at Commencement.