{"id":69116,"date":"2023-03-10T13:43:28","date_gmt":"2023-03-10T18:43:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/?p=69116"},"modified":"2023-04-03T11:38:43","modified_gmt":"2023-04-03T15:38:43","slug":"historic-photos-hidden-in-plain-sight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/historic-photos-hidden-in-plain-sight\/","title":{"rendered":"Historic Photos Hidden In Plain Sight"},"content":{"rendered":"
By Marc Chalufour<\/span><\/h6>\n

The College of Liberal Arts\u2019 first undergraduate class matriculated 150 years ago. By graduation, four years later, the Class of 1877 included 24 men and 8 women\u2014a rarity in higher education at the time. Among them were future members of the clergy, educators, a judge, a bookseller, a lumber merchant, a best-selling author, and a leader of the women\u2019s suffrage movement. The accomplishments of some would eventually lead to newspaper headlines, books, and (<\/span>much<\/span><\/i> later) Wikipedia pages. But most details about the class were thought to be lost to time\u2014until a remarkable discovery was made at the College of Arts & Sciences in 2022.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There, on a conference room bookshelf, an <\/span>1877 photo album<\/span><\/a> had been hiding in plain sight. Within its pages are some of the earliest known images of BU administrators and faculty\u2014and in some cases, these are the <\/span>only<\/span><\/i> known images. The entire Class of 1877 is included, first as a series of portraits and then as a group, as are BU\u2019s original buildings and lecture halls. In all, the album\u2019s 62 pristine photographs provide a detailed look at a formative moment in the college\u2019s history.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Discovery<\/b><\/h3>\n

\"\"On September 14, 2022, Daryl Healea, CAS assistant dean for curriculum and enrollment services, was invited to a meeting in the CAS business office. He arrived early and looked around the conference room. Although he\u2019d been there a dozen times before, he says, he had never studied what was in the cabinets and glass-covered bookshelves lining the walls. They hold financial reports, BU yearbooks, and miscellaneous artifacts like a ceramic BU plate and a brass microscope. Something else caught his eye that day: the spine of a thick book with the word \u201cPhotographs\u201d embossed across it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Healea, who\u2019s worked at CAS for eight years, has an active interest in BU\u2019s history. He\u2019s writing a book about BU\u2019s fourth president, Daniel L. Marsh, and has spent hours researching in the University\u2019s <\/span>Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m sure I\u2019m wrong about this, but I feel like I\u2019ve read everything that\u2019s ever been published about the University,\u201d Healea says. When he saw \u201cClass of \u201977\u201d embossed on the front cover, he assumed that meant 1977. Then he opened the album and saw an unfamiliar image of BU\u2019s first president, William Fairfield Warren, and immediately understood the significance of the album\u2019s contents. \u201cI\u2019ve never seen anything like it,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The photographs of Warren that still exist tend to show him later in life, with a graying beard and receding hair. In 1877, he was just four years into his tenure as president. \u201cThis is him in his prime, in his youth,\u201d Healea says. He kept flipping through the album, revealing one unique photo after another. \u201cIt\u2019s just a gold mine.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The exact history of the album is a mystery. Healea found a reference to it in the 1933 essay \u201cBeacon Hill and Boston University,\u201d by William Marshall Warren, former dean of CLA and son of William Fairfield Warren. After that, the album and its contents appear to have faded from the college\u2019s collective consciousness.<\/span><\/p>\n

On the occasion of the college\u2019s centennial, BU published <\/span>The College of Liberal Arts: 1873\u20131973<\/span><\/i> by Warren O. Ault, a CLA history professor from 1913 until 1965. Though Ault had access to the college\u2019s and University\u2019s papers and archives, the only photograph that his book has in common with the album is that of 18\u201320 Beacon Street.<\/span><\/p>\n

Skipping ahead to 1987, Lisa Doherty discovered the album among a collection of artifacts in the CLA dean\u2019s office (the college was renamed CAS in 1996). Doherty, now CAS director of operations and space planning, was then an assistant to the new dean and University provost, Dennis Berkey.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt was intuitive that these were historical in nature and important, but we never did anything with them,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019ve never had anybody ask to see them.\u201d In 2015, during another dean transition, Doherty moved the artifacts to the conference room cabinet where the album sat undisturbed until Healea spotted it seven years later.<\/span><\/p>\n

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