By Shannon Butler
Studying history can be incredibly enlightening, while also full of holes and dead ends. Sometimes the records that we hope to come across in our research have actually been lost to time, and our questions go unanswered. Sometimes we need to look beyond the well known facts, and take the time to examine the little details that are often overlooked in order to get a better understanding of our past. If we do this, we discover that there is history in every detail and in every object. Nobody knew this better than the first history professor of Vassar College, Lucy Maynard Salmon.
Lucy Maynard Salmon came to Poughkeepsie in 1887 after many years of experience studying and teaching history. Born on July 27, 1853 in Fulton, New York, Salmon’s father was a craftsman and her mother served as a principal of a female seminary. After studying in her mother’s seminary and graduating from high school she earned a degree in history from the University of Michigan in 1876. She became the principal of McGregor High School in Iowa until 1881, when she decided to return to Michigan to earn a masters degree in modern European history, English, and American constitutional history. Her thesis, “A History of the Appointing Power of the President,” was later published.
After teaching history at the Indiana State Normal School for a couple of years and a fellowship in American History at Bryn Mawr in 1886, Salmon was asked to serve as the first history professor at Vassar College. There had not been a formal history professor at Vassar until she arrived. In fact, history courses were only occasionally taught by the school’s president until Salmon came and formed a history department. She quickly earned the reputation as a progressive educator who believed in more than just lecturing at her students. She insisted on group discussion and intellectual conversations which she conducted around a long table in her room for hours at a time.
One of her intriguing methods of teaching was having her students look at everyday materials in the present world in order to see the clues of history going back to the beginning of time. For example, one could walk through a yard and take note of the fences and stone walls, which harken back to “prehistoric questions of the ownership of land.” In 1915, she published a piece entitled, “Main Street” wherein she focused on Poughkeepsie’s own Main Street and wrote:
that Poughkeepsie has become an industrial rather than a purely residential city is recorded not only by its factories that fringe the river bank and border its outskirts, but by the general appearance of its main and tributary streets. Two-family houses and flats had sprung up by the hundred, while small cheap stores, cheap restaurants, furnished rooms, cheap amusements, and more than a score of public laundries record a population industrial in character and more or less floating in its domestic life.
One of the things that Salmon does in her research is that she looks at the physical records that we leave behind, and in this case she is looking at the types of stores that fill the city center, with several five and dime shops, lots of saloons, and cigar shops. She also looks at the fact that advertising is littering the city’s landscape, almost as if it offended her that she had to see painted billboards on the sides of buildings as she took the trolley or rode her bike to Vassar College for work.
Salmon became a member of the “Committee of Seven” of the American Historical Association and also served on its executive council. She served as the president of the Association of History Teachers of the Middle Atlantic States and Maryland, an organization that she helped to create. She moved off campus and into a lovely residence at 263 Mill Street with her partner, the librarian for Vassar College, Adelaide Underhill. While living there, she became interested in all things Poughkeepsie, including becoming a part of the “City Beautiful” movement, which was sweeping the nation during the early 20th century and took hold in Poughkeepsie. She continued to write and teach until her death on February 14, 1927.
For more great images and letters from Lucy Salmon’s world, check out the New York Heritage Collection
References:
“Apostle of democracy; the life of Lucy Maynard Salmon” - LH B Salmon
Salmon, Lucy Maynard. History in a Back Yard, 1913
Salmon, Lucy Maynard. Main Street, 1915
Bohan, Chara Haeussler. Go to the Sources: Lucy Maynard Salmon and the Teaching of History, 2004
“Addresses at the Memorial Service for Lucy Maynard Salmon, Held at Vassar College March 6, 1927,” 1927 - LH B Salmon
Images:
ProfSalmon - Photo of Professor Lucy Maynard Salmon from the Vail Brothers Photography Collection - LH Collection
32LD23 - Photograph of the Main Building and approach at Vassar College, taken sometime around the opening of the college. - LH Collection