Each class of Wheaton College brings new traditions, experiences, and stories to the long history of the campus. One of the ways the College Archives seeks to preserve these transitory memories is by collecting student scrapbooks. With their rich ephemera of college life – jokes, notes, invitations, photographs, and other mementos – student scrapbooks offer a glimpse into a strange yet familiar past. While clothing has changed, new buildings have appeared, and student groups have come and gone, these scrapbooks document the continued vibrancy and experimentation of a liberal arts college education. Here are the snapshots of jaunts off-campus, the portraits of new friends, the paper remains of events (official and unofficial), and the scraps from the programs and clubs that come to define many students’ college experience.
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Research by Proxy: In the Manuscripts Reading Room with Chelsey Geisz
While Buswell Library Archives & Special Collections continually adds new digital content to our online archival photograph database and oral history interview collections, most of the thousands of pages of records in our collections can only be accessed in the Manuscripts Reading Room. We frequently receive inquiries from researchers who are unable to travel to use the collections, and so keep a list of local researchers who provide research and scanning services to distance patrons as “proxy researchers.” This week, we sat down with Chelsey Geisz for a behind-the-scenes look at proxy research in the Archives.
Chelsey Geisz is in her final semester of Wheaton College Graduate School’s MA in Systematic Theology. For the last year and a half, she has also served as a proxy researcher and a research assistant for a major College history project. Because of her work as a research assistant, she has the dubious distinction of likely being the only person alive who has read every Wheaton student publication from 1860-2000!
Continue reading‘He Had Something to Say and He Said It Well’: Billy Graham at Wheaton
Next week will mark the five year anniversary of Rev. Billy Graham’s passing on February 21, 2018. This month, in remembrance of his remarkable life and legacy, Buswell Library Archives & Special Collections commemorates the beginnings of Billy Graham’s evangelistic ministry as a fledgling undergraduate preacher at Wheaton College in 1940.
During Billy Graham’s time as a student at Florida Bible Institute (1937-1940), Alma Toff Edman, mother of then-interim president of Wheaton College, V. Raymond Edman, heard Graham preach at a local service. Impressed, she told her son Elner Edman and his friend Paul Fischer about the young preacher and urged that they hear him too. The two men invited Graham with them as a caddy for a round of golf. Similarly impressed with his passion for ministry and gift for speaking, they urged him to attend Wheaton College after graduating from FBI, to add a liberal arts education to his Bible and homiletics training. Graham applied to Wheaton and was accepted, starting on September 19, 1940.
Continue readingRemembering Christmas Past
It has often been astutely observed that our warm feeling for Christmas are not about the present but the past. In other words, sentimental memories of remembered holiday seasons profoundly color our present expectations. As the caretaker for the physical memories of Wheaton College, Buswell Library Archives & Special Collections maintains many photos, stories, and other mementos of the joyous, bygone yuletide seasons celebrated throughout the college’s history. As we wistfully glance back at campus festivities, perhaps the candlelit glow of our present Christmas will burn even brighter.
Continue readingScraps of Humor in the Archives: Stories from 160 Years of Wheaton College Pranks
While many of the records in the College Archives relate to the work of the administration, staff, and faculty at Wheaton College, the collections also hold documents from generations of Wheaton students, including biographical files, personal scrapbooks, student group papers, oral history interviews and student publications. Through these records, the College Archives preserves students’ experiences and traditions – the serious and the lighthearted. One of the most enduring of these student traditions documented by the Archives is that of the college prank.
Tales of Wheaton students’ antics appear from the very early days of the college. In A Minority of One, Clyde Kilby recounts one prank on the first president of Wheaton College, Jonathan Blanchard: On April Fool’s Day, students placed a goose on the lectern prior to Blanchard’s arrival. Upon entering Blanchard assessed the situation and left the classroom after exclaiming, “Well, students, I see you have chosen a new leader. Since he must be more to your liking, I will take the only course open to me. I will withdraw.”
Continue readingA Workman for Souls: Remembering William R. McCarrell
The influence of professors, students and administrators is often felt long after they are gone. A ministry might be deeply influential publicly or privately, but after the passage of years, memory of that work diminishes. Fortunately, Buswell Library Archives & Special Collections offers an opportunity to revisit the particulars of hard-won contributions to the history of Wheaton College, local Chicago missions, and world evangelism. One such story is that of Dr. William R. McCarrell.
Continue readingIn the Heart of the North Woods
This month hundreds of new Wheaton College students will visit HoneyRock Center for Leadership Development in the northern woods of Wisconsin as a part of the start of their Wheaton journey. Envisioned as “a laboratory in counseling and leadership for students,” time at HoneyRock has become a touchstone for many students’ experiences at Wheaton, as well as for Wheaton College faculty, staff, and their families.
Continue readingE. J. Carnell and the Mad Race for Relevance
Because Wheaton College is frequently associated with C.S. Lewis, whose papers are archived on campus at the Marion E. Wade Center, the popular English author is often humorously invoked as its patron saint. But the appellation could just as aptly fit Dr. Edward John Carnell, whose academic objectives, directly or indirectly, color the mission statements of nearly all accredited American evangelical liberal arts institutions. As theologian, philosopher and professor, Carnell played a crucial role in the development of contemporary evangelicalism, believing that conservative Christians too often failed to intellectually engage with the challenges posed by modernism. Widely networked among prominent American evangelicals of the mid-twentieth century, the movements of his extraordinary career can be seen in the various collections, books and files maintained by Buswell Library Archives & Special Collections.
Continue readingConstructed in the Clouds: The Unrealized Buildings of Wheaton College
Buildings, like people, mature and settle, acquiring unique histories and personalities through the passing seasons. Even when a beloved structure is lost to time as the result of demolition or decay, its influence burns a distinct impression into communal memory. At other times a form is planned but never built, perhaps due to lack of funding, changing needs, or diminished interest from its advocates.
The following structures, projected for the Wheaton College campus, remained stagnant on the drawing board but suggest fascinating, unrealized possibilities.
The idealistic depiction on the left, conveying the ambitious “Greater Wheaton” project printed in the 1934 Tower, visualizes a series of modern buildings burgeoning upward from the solid basis provided by the old fashioned, neo-Romanesque Blanchard Hall. In this sketch, the drafts of a future Wheaton pile higher and higher into the clouds of the artist’s imagination, where it would remain.
Continue readingCelebrating 40 Years of the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center!
Forty years ago this month, the newly completed Billy Graham Center was dedicated for Christian service on Wheaton College’s campus, the culmination of a decade’s worth of prayer, planning, and construction. The open-air dedication ceremony featured an array of processions, invocations, addresses, and prayers, flanked by performances of Caesar Giovannini and Ralph Vaughan Williams by the Wheaton College Conservatory combined choral groups. The ceremony’s centerpiece was a dedicatory address (Part 1 and Part 2) by the building’s namesake, Dr. Billy Graham, detailing the evangelist’s own intentions for the Center and its impact on the global Christian Church through ongoing education, training, and resources. This September, we celebrate the ongoing realization of Graham’s guiding hopes and commemorate the past four decades of fruitful Christian ministry documented in the Archives’ Collection 3: Records of the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center.
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From the Vault 