The photo was taken on the front steps of the Administration and Classroom Building, later known as “Old Austin.” That building was the grand center of the original campus, and included the offices of the president, Robert H. Wright, his staff, the faculty, their classrooms, an auditorium, and a one-room library. However, the 1909 picture does not emphasize the enormity of the Administrative and Classroom Building, but instead the very humanity of the core group who came to shape the school academically. The faculty depicted in the photo are (top row, left to right), Kate W. Lewis, drawing; William H. Ragsdale, school management; Birdie McKinney, Latin; Sallie Joyner Davis, history; (middle row, l-r), Maria D. Graham, mathematics; Mamie E. Jenkins, English; Herbert E. Austin, science; (bottom row, l-r): Claude W. Wilson, pedagogy; Jennie M. Ogden, household economics; Fannie Bishop, piano; and Robert H. Wright, president.
Significantly, Wright is not looking at the camera but instead towards his faculty, no doubt aware that the success of the school would ultimately be the product of their labors. It is they who have his attention, respect, and concern. Also significant is the composition of the faculty: unlike later decades when men dominated, early on East Carolina was an institution that not only empowered women as students, but as faculty as well. Of the ten, only three – Wilson, Ragsdale, and Austin – were male. The predominance of women in the faculty was a function of the school’s coeducational status, from day one, as well as its ability, as a new institution, to redefine tradition and innovate in ways that reflected the rising power of women in the early-twentieth century. Progressive though East Carolina might have been in elevating women to positions of academic power, on another count, that of human diversity, the historic photograph well captures a failing: the Jim Crow character of the school at the highest levels. Nearly fifty years would pass before the beginnings of a more diverse faculty begin to surface.
Someone clearly valued the 1909 picture and preserved it. The first East Carolina publication to include it was the 1926 Tecoan where it appears towards the end of the volume, just before the last section, entitled “Potpourri.” There, the picture is juxtaposed with another, including nineteen faculty members, and Robert Wright, president, again on the steps of the Administrative and Classroom Building, but this time standing rather than sitting. The second picture includes most of the charter faculty (minus Jennie M. Ogden and Fannie Bishop), plus several others who had joined as the school had grown since 1909. The second picture includes W. H. Ragsdale, who passed away in 1914, and so must have been taken in either 1913 or early 1914.
The 1913-1914 Catalogue indeed lists nineteen faculty in addition to Wright: Claude W. Wilson, pedagogy; William H. Ragsdale, school management; Leon R. Meadows, English; Mamie E. Jenkins, English; Harold Whitehurst, English; Birdie McKinney, English and history; Sallie Joyner Davis, history; Herbert E. Austin, science; Margery L. Herman, science; Alice V. Wilson, science; Elizabeth Pugh Carr, domestic science; Maria D. Graham, mathematics; Mabel M. Comfort, mathematics and history; Daisy Bailey Waitt, Latin; May Barrett, primary methods; Kate W. Lewis, drawing; May R. B. Muffly, public school music and voice; Lida Hill, piano; and Miriam MacFayden, critic teacher. Presumably, these were the faculty included in the second picture.
The 1926 Tecoan labels these pictures facetiously, the first “A Scene from Yesterday (The Faculty),” and the second, “The Faculty As They Were.” Seventeen years had passed between the first ECTTS faculty photograph and publication of the 1926 Tecoan. In that time, the First World War had been fought and won, East Carolina had become a teachers’ college, women had won the right to vote, and styles in clothing and behavior had changed radically. The young ladies presented in the 1926 Tecoan typically displayed personal gaiety and a liberated self-presentation not evident in either of the earlier faculty photos. Their inclusion towards the end of the 1926 Tecoan revealed – with faculty as cultural artifacts – their distance in time, fashion, and modernity from the seemingly more progressive moment that had been realized. No doubt the students were making fun of the past, especially the female faculty and their long-sleeved, floor-length dresses, but they were also pioneering an understanding of the extent to which historical change and to some degree progress had been realized at the new school.
Inclusion of the photographs also brought to light significant pieces of photographic history, the earliest pictures of the East Carolina faculty. Not surprisingly, from 1926 forward, the 1909 picture of the charter faculty was a staple in historical remembrances of the beginnings of the school. Naturally enough, perhaps, before that historical beginning point could be recognized and appreciated, it had to become distanced from the present, a foreign thing of the past.
By the time East Carolina was founded, cameras and photographic technology had become sufficiently widespread so that the school’s history could be and indeed often was documented not simply with sketches, drawings, and portraits, but with photographs that more accurately depicted the people and places of our past. This 1909 photo of President Robert H. Wright and East Carolina’s ten charter faculty is one of ECU’s earliest and most historically important pieces. However, for the first decade and a half of East Carolina’s existence, it was little recognized and certainly not prominently displayed. It is not found in the Training School Quarterlies, otherwise a major source of photos of the early campus, its leaders, students, and activities. Nor does it appear in the Training School Catalogues, another early publication including photos of the school and its people. Despite having dwelt in relative obscurity, the photograph captures one of the earliest stages of East Carolina’s history, and has rightly come to be included time and again in later historical presentations related to ECU and its past. As a significant moment captured in a photograph, it ranks with the 1908 picture of the groundbreaking over which former governor Thomas J. Jarvis presided. At that point, however, none of the individuals photographed in the 1909 picture had been hired. This picture captures the school not as a dream but as an academic reality in the very human form of its founding president and charter faculty.
Sources
- “A Scene From Yesterday (The Faculty).” Tecoan 1926, p. 255. University Archives 50.01.1926. J. Y. Joyner Library. East Carolina University. Greenville, N. C. https://digital.lib.ecu.edu/15331.271
- Bratton, Mary Jo. East Carolina University: The Formative Years, 1907-1982. Greenville, N.C. East Carolina University Alumni Association. 1986. P. 100.
- “Faculty.” First Annual Catalogue of East Carolina Teachers’ Training School. Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton, 1910. P. 7. University Archives # 50.02.02.01. J. Y. Joyner Library. East Carolina University. Greenville, N.C. https://digital.lib.ecu.edu/6033
- “First faculty of East Carolina Teachers Training School.” 1909. University Archives # 55.01.00.3. J. Y. Joyner Library. East Carolina University. Greenville, N.C. https://digital.lib.ecu.edu/830
- “Faculty.” Fifth Annual Catalogue of the East Carolina Teachers Training School, 1913-1914. 1914. Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton Printing Company. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/fifthannualcatal05east/page/n7
- Ferrell, Henry C. No Time for Ivy: East Carolina University, 1907-2007. Greenville, N.C.: East Carolina University, 2006. P. 8.
- “The Faculty As They Were.” Tecoan 1926, p. 256. University Archives 50.01.1926. J. Y. Joyner Library. East Carolina University. Greenville, N. C. https://digital.lib.ecu.edu/15331.272
Additional Related Materials
Citation Information
Title: 1909 Charter Faculty and 1914 ECTTS Faculty
Author: John A. Tucker, PhD
Date of Publication:7/1/2019