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This is a finding aid. It is a description of archival material held in the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Unless otherwise noted, the materials described below are physically available in our reading room, and not digitally available through the World Wide Web. See the FAQ section for more information.
Preservation of and access to the sound recordings in the Penn School Papers were made possible through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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Collection Overview
| Size | 50.0 feet of linear shelf space (approximately 32,000 items) |
| Abstract | The Penn School on Saint Helena Island, S.C., was founded during the Civil War by northern philanthropists and missionaries for former plantation slaves in an area occupied by the United States Army. Over the years, with continuing philanthropic support, it served as school, health agency, and cooperative society for rural African Americans of the Sea Islands. The first principals were Laura M. Towne and Ellen Murray, followed around 1908 by Rossa B. Cooley and Grace B. House, and in 1944 by Howard Kester and Alice Kester. The school became Penn Community Services in 1950, with Courtney Siceloff as the first director, and the Penn Center, Inc. in the 1980s. The original deposits are papers, mostly 1900-1970, mainly from the Penn School, and primarily correspondence of the directors and of the trustees, treasurers, and publicity workers located elsewhere. Topics include African American education, Reconstruction, political and social change in South Carolina, agricultural extension work, public health issues, damage from hurricanes, World War I, the boll weevil and the cotton industry, the effects of the Great Depression on the school and the local population, changes in the school leading to a greater emphasis on social action in the outer world, and the end of the school and the turn to community service. Volumes include diaries, extracts from letters, recollections, minutes of the board of trustees, ledgers, cashbooks, inventories, financial records, registers of students and teachers, and minutes of various clubs and societies. Printed materials consists of newspapers clippings, pamphlets, promotional literature, school materials, administrative circulars, and annual reports. There are also about 3,000 photographs in the collection, dating from the 1860s to 1962 (bulk 1905-1944), documenting school activities, Island scenes and Islanders, classes and teachers, baptisms, agricultural activities, parades, fairs, and special events at the Penn School. Also included are about 300 audiotapes with oral history interviews and recordings of community acivities, 1954-1979. The Addition of 2005, contains papers of Courtney Siceloff, director of Penn Community Services, 1950-1970, and secretary of the South Carolina Advisory Committee of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, circa 1960-1970. Penn Community Services materials are chiefly administrative and financial. Material relating to the United States Commission on Civil Rights and its state advisory committees, especially the South Carolina Advisory Committee, includes some information about specific discrimination cases. |
| Creator | Penn School (Saint Helena Island, S.C.) |
| Language | English |
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Information For Users
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Subject Headings
The following terms from Library of Congress Subject Headings suggest topics, persons, geography, etc. interspersed through the entire collection; the terms do not usually represent discrete and easily identifiable portions of the collection--such as folders or items.
Clicking on a subject heading below will take you into the University Library's online catalog.
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Historical Information
Penn School had its origins in the Port Royal Experiment, which began in Beaufort, S.C., in April 1862. Slavery had ended there in November 1861, when Federal naval forces, after the battle of Port Royal Sound, seized Beaufort and the archipelago stretching from Charleston to Savannah, Ga. These Islands, the site of long-staple cotton agriculture, were populated largely by the blacks who planted, cultivated and harvested this valuable crop. In spite of their investment on the Islands, the white planters and slaveholders abandoned their slaves and plantations and fled to Confederate territory upon the arrival of the Union forces. The task of the more than 50 abolitionists of the Port Royal Experiment, who arrived on the Sea Islands in April 1862, was to begin where the planters had left the slaves, to tutor the freedmen out of slavery and into freedom.
The members of this abolitionist expedition were a mixed group, from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and elsewhere in the North, affiliated with several freedmen's aid societies and Protestant churches, trained in various professions to work among the black agricultural laborers of the South, but all committed to emancipation of the slaves as the paramount objective of the Civil War then being waged. Among this group was Laura M. Towne (1825-1901) of Philadelphia, representative of the Port Royal Relief Committee of Philadelphia, trained to some extent in medicine and dedicated to Garrisonian abolitionism. Soon after her arrival in Beaufort, Laura Towne moved to nearby Saint Helena Island, the largest of the Sea Islands, where she would live and work for the next four decades. In June 1862, she was joined by Ellen Murray (1834-1908), her friend from Newport, R.I. While Towne at first devoted her time to the medical needs of Saint Helena people, she soon began to join Murray in the work of teaching school, first in a room in their house on the Oaks Plantation and later in Brick Church at Frogmore, near the center of Saint Helena.
The history of the Penn School dates from 18 June 1862, Ellen Murray's first day teaching black students on Saint Helena. Towne and Murray named their school in honor of William Penn and his belief in the brotherhood of all humanity and from their own association with the Pennsylvania Freedmen's Aid Society. This group, composed largely of Friends, sent the first schoolhouse (prefabricated in sections) by boat from the North in 1865 and for years thereafter helped finance the school. The special dedication of these two women and their supporters in Philadelphia sustained them in their work at Penn School until the dawn of the 20th century. During these years, the two women witnessed the redistribution of land on Saint Helena, carried out by the Federal government during the Civil War and the first years of Reconstruction, and the development of a black yeomanry free, by and large, from white control.
In 1900, hoping to perpetuate their work on Saint Helena, Towne and Murray made plans for the incorporation of their school, and the following year the state of South Carolina chartered the Penn Normal, Industrial and Agricultural School. Hollis Burke Frissell, principal of Hampton Institute in Virginia and the first chair of the board of trustees, became a moving force for the reorganized Penn School. His fellow trustees, mainly whites from the North, included members of a new generation of philanthropists interested in the education of southern African Americans as well as men and women whose interest in race relations dated from an earlier era.
Laura Towne died on 22 February 1901, and, although Ellen Murray was to live and work until 1908, Hollis Frissell began a search for their successors. In Rossa Belle Cooley (1872-1949), daughter of a Vassar College chemistry professor, and Grace Bigelow House (1877-1961), daughter of a missionary teacher in Turkey, he found two unusual women who would lead Penn School for the next 40 years. In selecting Cooley and House, both teachers at Hampton Institute, Frissell helped propagate the gospel of industrial education associated with Hampton Institute and made famous by Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee.
Rossa B. Cooley arrived on Saint Helena in 1904 and Grace B. House came the following year, but it was not until the death of Ellen Murray in 1908 that Hollis Frissell's two proteges assumed their full responsibilities as principal and assistant principal of Penn School. The next three decades were full ones for Cooley, House, and their school. They had the help of their teachers and staff, and of a small group of faithful trustees: Francis R. Cope, Jr., gentleman farmer from Dimmock, Pa., whose grandfather and namesake had raised money for Laura Towne; George Foster Peabody, native of Georgia, who made his fortune in New York and then became a noted if eccentric philanthropist; Henry Wilder Foote, Unitarian minister of Boston and other pulpits; L. Hollingsworth Wood, Quaker, New York attorney, and leader in the National Urban League; Isabella Curtis, the school's publicist in Boston; and Harold Evans, their banker in Philadelphia. Cooley and House also cultivated the friendship of men in various philanthropic foundations interested in African American education: the General Education Board; the Slater Fund; the Rosenwald Fund; the Phelps-Stokes Fund; and the multimillionaire Arthur Curtiss James. With this help, they turned Penn into a model African American school.
Cooley and House applied to their work two principles of progressive education: learning for living and learning by doing. While Laura Towne and Ellen Murray believed in academic education and teacher training as the cornerstones of African American advancement, Rossa B. Cooley and Grace B. House emphasized vocational training, especially in agriculture, and the preparation of African Americans to lead more satisfying and productive lives within their own community. For the execution of their broad vision, they extended their sphere of influence out from the Penn School campus over the whole of Saint Helena Island, which they treated as one school-farm-community. They established a credit co-operative for local farmers; worked with South Carolina State College in teacher-training programs; and carried out plans for improving practically every aspect of the lives of the African American yeomanry, including better homes, modern child care, new cash crops, scientific farming methods, and moral, religious, medical and cultural uplift.
The depth and breadth of their efforts brought Penn School to the attention of educators, journalists, sociologists, philanthropists, missionaries, and a number of socially prominent people. Numerous visitors to Saint Helena helped spread the reputation of Penn School and its gospel not only among Americans interested in African American education, but also to many foreign missionaries and colonial officials, especially in British territories in southern Africa and India.
Not all of the efforts of Rossa B. Cooley and Grace B. House bore fruit and many plans and projects proved to be unworkable for the Island population. But their limited success at the school and on the Island must be set against a background of economic conditions that severely circumscribed the realization of their vision. There were devastating hurricanes in 1911 and 1940, and the arrival of the boll weevil in 1918 destroyed forever the strain of long-staple cotton upon which the income of the Sea Island farmers was based. Difficult economic conditions were accompanied by the continuing exodus of African American people from their Island farms to towns on the mainland and the cities of the North. This out-migration increased during the two world wars and the completion of the bridge between the Island and Beaufort in 1927 made it easy for the people of Saint Helena to leave home. The declining population and the departure of the school's graduates further handicapped the work of Cooley and House.
The principals of Penn School could not continue their experiment on the Island when local conditions presented so many obstacles. Nor, by the late 1930s, did the promotional and fund-raising activities to which Cooley had dedicated so much effort meet the financial needs of the school. The two women were growing old, and by 1940 the trustees were looking for a new pair of principals.
Although Rossa B. Cooley and Grace B. House resisted efforts to retire them, the board of trustees in 1944 appointed two white southerners, Howard "Buck" Kester and his wife Alice, as the new principal and assistant principal. A minister by training, a Christian socialist, and disciple of Reinhold Niebuhr, Howard Kester had worked actively for social and spiritual change in the South, especially with the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen. The Kesters sought to maintain the traditions that their predecessors had established at Penn School and, at the same time, involve the school in a larger way with the changes in race relations then taking place in the South and elsewhere.
In spite of their good intentions, the Kesters provoked resentment from those at Penn School who preferred the ways of Cooley and House, who still lived nearby at Ndulamo, their retirement home. Nor could the Kesters solve the economic problems facing the school. In 1947, the Kesters resigned, and Howard Kester resumed his Fellowship of Southern Churchmen duties in 1948.
Before the departure of the Kesters, the Penn School board of trustees had appointed a committee, headed by the noted Atlanta University sociologist Ira De A. Reid, to study the school and to make recommendations for its future. Reid argued in his report that Penn School should relinquish its academic responsibilities and concentrate its work on community services. The trustees accepted Reid's findings, and in 1948 the students at the school were taken into the South Carolina public schools.
After 86 years, the Penn School of Laura Towne, Ellen Murray, Rossa B. Cooley, and Grace B. House was no more. The trustees renamed the corporation Penn Community Services and dedicated it to "community planning and improvement, sanitation and health, recreation and sport, and mental and spiritual hygiene."
In 1950, the trustees appointed Courtney Siceloff the first director of Penn Community Services, a position he held until 1970. During Siceloff's time as director, the Penn Community Services site was widely used as a conference center for organizations hoping to advance African-American causes or to support equality, education, welfare, and other social issues. While serving as director, Siceloff also served as a Regional Consultant for the United States Commission on Civil Rights, Southern Regional Office, and then, beginning in 1960 and continuing until around 1970, as secretary for the South Carolina Advisory Committee to the Commission.
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Scope and Content
The Penn School papers consist chiefly of office files from the African American school and community center on Saint Helena Island, S.C. Correspondence is primarily of Rossa B. Cooley, Grace B. House, and later Howard Kester. There is also correspondence of trustees, treasurers, and publicity workers located elsewhere. Materials relate to the day-to-day administration of the school and its program. Included are letters dealing with the purchase of supplies and equipment; planning and construction of new buildings, especially Cope Industrial Building in 1912 and Frissell Memorial Community Building in 1925; hiring and assignment of personnel; development of the school curriculum and programs; and the festivals, clubs and contests sponsored by the school that involved the entire community. There are also financial statements and other reports; scattered lists of faculty, students, and contributors to the school; correspondence about fund-raising and promotional campaigns; and articles and speeches about the school by Cooley, House, and others.
Although the work at Penn was carried out by African American teachers for the benefit of African American students and farmers on Saint Helena Island, it was the white principals and trustees who generated and maintained most of the written records found here. While these papers offer a great opportunity to examine the life and history of an African American school in an African American community, it is necessary to note that the greatest part of the literary remains of Penn School was created by and written from the point of view of the white philanthropists who directed the work of the school.
Materials document the influence of Penn School far beyond the Sea Islands. There is a substantial body of correspondence with philanthropic and educational organizations, magazine editors, and others interested in the work of Penn School as a model for African American education. Included also are letters from local, state, and federal officials with whom Cooley and House worked, especially on problems of agriculture, health, sanitation, and education.
The quantity of materials for any particular year or period tends to vary directly with the age of the school. There is very little material for the early years, indeed not much at all for the almost four decades of Laura Towne's principalship except among the volumes. Starting with the turn of the 20th century, however, there is a steady increase in the amount of material, which becomes especially heavy in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Material related to Penn Community Services, the institution established after Penn School's transformation in 1950, can be found in the Addition of 2005, Series 8.
Among the volumes are copies of letters and diaries of Laura Towne and Arthur Sumner, 1861-1895; trustee minutes, 1900-1948; account books, inventories and other financial records, 1901-1960; records of the Industrial Committee, Co-operative Society, Corn Club, Better Homes Contest and other school and community organizations; and lists of both students and teachers as well as two guest books. Also included are selected printed materials: annual reports from 1890 to 1947, promotional literature, and newspaper and magazine articles.
The approximately 3,000 photographs, the earliest of which date from the 1860s and the latest from 1962, are an important part of the collection. Photographs are fewest during the years 1862-1890 and 1948-1962. Most of them date from 1905 to 1944, the tenure of Cooley and House as teachers and principals. They are found chiefly in 21 photograph albums, nine of which seem to have been assembled by the principals for display. Photographs (and some drawings) document school activities, Island scenes and Islanders, classes and teachers, baptisms, agricultural activities, parades, fairs, and special events at the Penn School.
Sound recordings are chiefly oral history interviews from the 1970s. Films document community activities in the 1970s.
The Addition of 2005, contains papers of Courtney Siceloff, director of Penn Community Services, 1950-1970, and secretary of the South Carolina Advisory Committee of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, circa 1960-1970. Penn Community Services materials include administrative notes, minutes, pamphlets, reports, correspondence, and historical information relating to general administration and to committees and properties. There are also financial materials, including statements, receipts, invoices, budgets, correspondence, memos, financial reports, returned checks, and tax information, mostly 1952-1970. Information on other organizations and programs includes pamphlets, clippings, correspondence, and other items. Material relating to the United States Commission on Civil Rights and its state advisory committees, especially the South Carolina Advisory Committee, includes correspondence, reports, pamphlets, notes, minutes, and clippings. There is also some information about specific discrimination cases brought before the South Carolina Advisory Committee relating to poverty, education, school integration, housing discrimination, urban renewal, employment practices, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and discrimination in hospital and health facilities.
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Series 1. General Materials, 1863-1976 and undated.
The following description is based on the Guide to the Microfilm Edition of the Penn School Papers, 1862-1976 (1977).
Correspondence and related materials make up most of this series. Note that bills and receipts are in a separate chronological run at the end of the series.
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Subseries 1.1. Early Years, 1863-1906.
Correspondence begins in 1863, but only a handful of letters survive from that year. Two letters are of special interest: Captain Edward Hooper commented, 23 February 1863, on the condition of the freedmen, and Henry Lowndes, apparently a former slave, 9 October 1863.
From 1872 through 1877, there is a series of more than 50 letters from Laura Towne to Francis R. Cope (the elder). Most of this correspondence deals with financial arrangements for the support of the school, for which Cope was the chief agent, but Towne also wrote, 13 July 1874 and 27 November 1874, about general political conditions in South Carolina. At the end of reconstruction, there is a set of letters from Towne to Cope describing the local activities of the Ku Klux Klan, the faith of the freedmen in the federal government, and their fear of losing the lands they owned and worked. These letters to Cope supplement the material published in Letters and Diary of Laura M. Towne (1912).
Papers for the final years of Ellen Murray's tenure are scant, including only a small number of letters and manuscript annual reports. Her report to the trustees in 1906, which marked the end of more than 40 years of service to the school, contains a statement of her education philosophy and program.
Three letters of recommendation written for Grace B. House by professors at Columbia University Teachers College in 1900 and a copy of the [1901?] by-laws of the Penn Normal, Industrial and Agricultural School signal the slow start of the regime of Rossa B. Cooley and Grace B. House. A letter, 25 July 1903, from Robert D. Jenks to Rossa B. Cooley marks the first appearance of the woman who would be the dominant figure at the school for the next 40 years. There is also one letter, 14 July 1904, from Frances Butler, the Hampton teacher who accompanied Rossa B. Cooley as her assistant and who died a few months after arriving on Saint Helena.
For additional information on the early years of Penn School see also the correspondence in 1912, the 50th anniversary of the school, undated materials, printed materials, and volumes 1-5.
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Subseries 1.2. New Beginning, 1907-1917.
Many of the papers for this decade are the records and correspondence of the school's treasurer, George Foster Peabody, who served Penn School in many capacities until his death in 1938. Other trustees who were correspondents in this period include Francis R. Cope, Jr. (Frank), the grandson of Laura Towne's friend; Henry Wilder Foote, the Unitarian minister; Robert Darrah Jenks, Laura Towne's great-nephew; James R. Macdonald, a Saint Helena merchant; Hollis Burke Frissell, the first chair of the board of trustees; and Alfred Collins Maule, a Philadelphia Quaker who for years was in charge of publicity and fund-raising for Penn School.
Throughout her years at Penn School, Rossa B. Cooley concentrated much of her efforts on fund-raising and publicity. In a 1907 letter she referred to Leigh Richmond Miner from Hampton Institute whose photographs she later used extensively in publicity. By 1914, Paul U. Kellogg, the editor of Survey and later Survey Graphic, had become interested in the work of Penn School. Thereafter, there is correspondence with him as well as drafts of articles written for Survey Graphic and other magazines, beginning with a 1916 article, "How Freedom Came to Big Pa," by Grace B. House. For copies of this and other articles see printed materials.
The principals and trustees had contacts with agents of several foundations especially interested in the education of African Americans in the American South, including the John F. Slater Fund and Phelps-Stokes Fund. In 1915, Julius Rosenwald, patron of African American education, wrote to Cooley, and in 1916 there are general lists of contributors to Penn School. Jackson Davis and his colleague Trevor Arnett, both of the Rockefeller General Education Board, were among the most helpful friends of the school. A letter of 1917 marks the beginning of Davis's long association with the school. For additional information on fund-raising during these years see volume 22 and printed materials.
Among the school and community programs begun by Cooley and House during this period, agriculture took priority. In 1909, Seaman A. Knapp wrote Cooley about starting agricultural extension work on Saint Helena, and in 1911, Joseph Enoch Blanton, later president of Voorhees College, became supervisor of industrial education at Penn School as well as county agent. On 30 November 1912, he wrote at length to the United States Department of Agriculture about the progress in his program of demonstration work. There are also letters from Juno Washington, who was born a slave and became an early student and later an agricultural teacher at Penn School.
On 27 August 1911, a devastating hurricane struck Saint Helena, and there is considerable material dealing with the storm and its aftermath, including the campaign for relief funds. As part of these efforts, Penn School, with the help of trustee L. Hollingsworth Wood, organized the Saint Helena Co-operative Society to furnish credit to the farmers on the Island. In each year for the next two decades, there are numerous applications for loans from the Society. These application forms, along with the Society's records, found in volumes 30-32, 41, and 43, and in the undated and printed materials, contain a good deal of information about life on the Island's small farms.
Two other important developments followed in the wake of the hurricane. Construction of the Cope Industrial Building, begun before the hurricane and financed by the General Education Board, offered work relief for Island residents and later provided new facilities for the school's shops, which became increasingly important as the new curriculum developed. In 1912, Penn School for the first time required vocational competence as well as academic skills for graduation. An upper division was added to provide the necessary additional training.
1912 marked the 50th anniversary of Penn School and the attendant celebrations generated much fund-raising activity and publicity. There is also some correspondence with men and women active in the 1860s, including abolitionists William Channing Gannett, Harriet Ware, and Helen M. Philbrick, and Robert Smalls, the onetime slave who had become a local Civil War hero and member of Congress. Harriet Ware wrote on 19 March 1912 of her recollection of the first reading of the Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January 1863.
There are also drafts of the article Grace B. House wrote on the anniversary celebrations for the Southern Workman. Other prominent correspondents at this time include Ray Stannard Baker, the progressive journalist; Samuel Chiles Mitchell, president of the University of South Carolina; Helen C. Jenks, Laura Towne's niece; Ethel Paine, a new member of the board of trustees; and Willis D. Weatherford and James Hardy Dillard, two leading southern white participants in the interracial movement.
Although seldom directly involved in politics, Penn School did maintain contacts with the government of South Carolina and the larger world. In 1911, for example, agitation began for the bridge to the mainland, which the principals of Penn School opposed in vain until its completion in 1927. W. C. Gannett expressed his fears, 12 May 1914, about the proposed South Carolina law that could prohibit white teachers from instructing African American students. In 1914 and 1915, Rossa B. Cooley carried on correspondence with J. LaBruce Ward, a South Carolina public health officer, dealing with the problems of typhoid and hookworm on the Sea Islands.
The school in 1917 went on a year-round schedule geared to local agricultural cycles, and all teachers became home visitors. The papers thereafter, including letters of Benjamin Barnwell, a graduate of the school who took charge of the school farm in 1916, reports on "Home Corn Acres," reviews of the "Model Acre," and minutes of agricultural meetings, document the increasing emphasis on agricultural education. Within the community, the faculty of Penn School took the lead in the foundation of Homemakers' Club, Corn Club, YMCA-YWCA, and other organizations, and in 1916 representatives of these organizations along with the school principals, local ministers, and the Island doctor formed a Community Council to coordinate the work of this expanded classroom. See also volume 33.
The first decade of Cooley and House ended on a somber note with the death in 1917 of Hollis Burke Frissell, chair of the board of trustees, who had inspired and guided so much of their work.
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Subseries 1.3. Years of Calm, 1918-1930.
From 1918 to 1931, Cooley and House were able to further the development of Penn School and at the same time spread their program as the model for African American education far beyond the Island. Although World War I, the destruction of the cotton agriculture by the boll weevil, and the completion of the bridge to the mainland in 1927 spurred out-migration, Cooley and House continued to expand the role of the school within the community and undertook new fund-raising and publicity campaigns, culminating in the dedication of the Frissell Memorial Community Building in 1925 and the publication of Homes of the Freed in 1924 and School Acres in 1930. They also welcomed to the school visitors from Africa and elsewhere, including three sociologists who undertook a detailed study of the school and community in 1928.
There is a good deal of material, mainly in 1918, about World War I. The United States Marine Corps developed a training camp on Parris Island, next door to Saint Helena, and the Red Cross was active in civilian war work on the home front. Robert Russa Moton of Tuskegee Institute and Anson Phelps Stokes of the Phelps-Stokes Fund wrote Cooley about matters relating to the war. She and George Foster Peabody interceded with the Draft Exemption Board on behalf of local men. There are also letters from Penn School students and graduates, including D. Cook Jones, Ceasar Wright, and Benjamin Barnwell, in army training camps or with the American Expeditionary Force in France. On Armistice Day, Cooley wrote to James P. King, who later replaced Joshua Blanton as superintendent of industrial education at Penn School, of "this Great Day."
Along with the war came the boll weevil, which destroyed the long-staple cotton agriculture which had been the economic mainstay of the Island. In 1919, there is a report on the advance of the boll weevil throughout the South. In 1920, Cooley wrote Arthur Curtiss James, the railroad magnate who made semi-annual contributions of $2,500 to the school, that it had been an "intense and difficult year." The papers contain a good deal about the effort to find a replacement for cotton as the staple crop of the Islands. People at Penn School were especially interested in growing peanuts.
The farmers of Saint Helena often risked losing their lands for non-payment of taxes, and there is considerable material on efforts to save the lands of the African American yeomanry. William H. Mills of Clemson College, one of the first white southerners to serve as a trustee of the school, devoted much of his time and agricultural expertise to help the people of the Island.
To halt the migration precipitated by the agricultural crisis, Cooley and House expanded their efforts to improve the quality of life on the Island and to secure funds to expand the role of the school. From 1918 to 1925, they conducted a major campaign to raise funds for a building, dedicated to Hollis Burke Frissell, to house their community activities. Included is correspondence with Thomas Jesse Jones of the Phelps-Stokes Fund, J. H. Dillard of the John F. Slater Fund, and Wallace Buttrick of the General Education Board. See also volume 48. The building was dedicated on Founders Day in April 1925.
In 1925, supporters of the school began establishing Penn School Clubs at Vassar College, New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, and elsewhere, and there is much correspondence between the principals and club officers. Of particular interest is the Penn School Club of New York City, made up of emigrants from Saint Helena in Harlem, who regularly contributed scholarship funds for students at the school. Rosa Long provided, 17 October 1927, a membership list of the club. See also volume 42, records of the Penn School Club of Boston, 1918-1922, and club year books among the printed materials.
Others with whom Cooley corresponded about fund-raising include James E. Gregg, who succeeded Hollis B. Frissell at Hampton Institute and on the Penn School board of trustees; George Foster Peabody, who tried, 17 August 1926, to interest John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford in one of his favorite philanthropies; Hollingsworth Wood, who sent Cooley a draft, 26 January 1927, of his letter to the General Education Board outlining the financial needs of Penn School; Alfred R. Stern of the Rosenwald Fund, who indicated in September 1927 that the fund would provide money for building a school at Coffin Point on the Island; and Arthur Curtiss James, who sent $500 for a new barn in March 1929.
Along with their fund-raising, Cooley and House worked to obtain greater public recognition for the achievements of Penn School. Ambrose E. Gonzales, editor of the Columbia, S.C., State, featured articles about the school in his newspaper and offered prizes for the annual farmers' fair. Beginning in 1923, Cooley published a series of articles on her work in the Survey Graphic, and she received letters about these articles from its editor Paul Kellogg and from readers who liked what she had written. In 1926, Homes of the Freed, a collection of her articles, was published, and there are a number of letters from Countee Cullen of Opportunity; David Mebane of the New Republic, which published the book; and others congratulating her. Copies of the articles and the book are among the printed materials. Also in 1926, Henry Wilder Foote, Isabella Curtis, a Boston trustee of the school, and Margaret McCulloch, a white woman long active in the interracial movement, helped organize a northern tour for the Penn School Quartet to attract attention and money to the school.
Although they devoted much time to fund-raising and publicity, Cooley and House did not neglect their vision of an expanded role for the school on the Island. Using the Frissell Memorial Community Building as a base, they established a number of new school programs between 1918 and 1930. In 1920, the school held its first Baby Day to educate mothers about child care and to evaluate the health of each baby. Much attention was also given to the National Better Homes Campaigns, which were held every year across the nation. From 1922 to 1924, Penn School won third, second, and a special first prize in these national contests. There is a letter, 5 July 1924, from Calvin Coolidge congratulating Penn School on its prize in the contest, along with other correspondence and reports. See also volumes 50B and 50C.
During the years of national prohibition, the principals, particularly House, were active in reporting illegal stills to the federal enforcement officials, who did not share her enthusiasm for the crusade against alcohol. On temperance work, see also volumes 27 and 40. Cooley was more successful in the effort, aided by money from the Rosenwald Fund, to increase state expenditures for the public school on Saint Helena. Beginning in 1926, there are reports on the public schools of the Island made by Maud J. Sanders, a traveling supervisory teacher.
There is also considerable material on other projects of Penn School on the farms and in the homes of Saint Helena Island: in January 1927, a short history of community health work; in late 1928 and early 1929, a number of reports on student farm plots; in November 1929, a list of home visits made by the county teacher during Potato Week; and, for 1930, the report of the Corn Club. See also volumes 49, 50A, and 50D, records of Penn student clubs.
Scattered throughout the papers for these years are comments on the status of African Americans and race relations. J. P. King told an insurance agent on 14 July 1923 that it was "not necessary to put the word 'colored' on mail addressed to us in order for us to receive it." George Foster Peabody sent out a series of letters, 8 October 1923, inquiring about racial ideas, South and North. In April 1924, L. Hollingsworth Wood wrote revealingly of his own racial attitudes. Mabel Carney, professor at Columbia Teachers College, discussed on 16 March 1925, the Hampton-Tuskegee fund-raising drive and the course she was teaching on African American education. In October and November 1925, several students wrote brief essays on the aims of Penn School. In August 1928, Hollingsworth Wood inquired about the possibility of African American trustees and Robert Russa Moton agreed in February 1929 to serve on the Penn School Board.
In the late 1920s, Margaret C. McCulloch replaced the two principals of Penn School when they each took a year's sabbatical in Europe, and there is considerable correspondence with her. Especially interesting is the description of Penn School in McCulloch's letter, 15 September 1927, to Alice Busbee.
In 1918, Gregorio Torres Quintero, a Mexican specialist in rural education who visited Saint Helena, wrote about his visit to Cooley. He was the first of many visitors to Penn School in the 1920s to record their impressions of the school. Many were missionaries about to report to stations in Africa and elsewhere who hoped to apply the principles and practices of Penn School in other countries. Of particular interest are the letters in 1925 from Emory Ross, African missionary and friend of Albert Schweitzer; a discussion in May 1926 by Mabel Carney of the influence of Penn School in Africa; letters in 1926 and 1928 from Charles T. Loram, a professor of education who taught in South Africa and later at Yale; material about the 1928 visit of Winold Reiss, a German-born artist who executed unusual portraits of the Island people; and a form letter to contributors, June 1930, in which Cooley spoke of teaching at Penn School. See also volume 65B, guest register 1905-1962, and reports by African visitors among the printed materials.
In 1927 and 1928, two sociologists and a historian from the University of North Carolina carried out extensive research on Saint Helena Island. Thomas J. Woofter, Jr., who headed the group, discussed with Cooley the proposed study, which was sponsored by the Social Science Research Council and the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences at Chapel Hill, and sent her a copy of his proposal, "Saint Helena Island: A Study of Negro Culture and Social Development." There is also correspondence with the other two scholars, Guy B. Johnson and Guion Griffis Johnson, and a considerable amount of statistical data on the families and schools of Saint Helena. Much of this material seems to have come from the 1920 census. Another aspect of this research was carried out in New York City, where Clyde V. Kiser studied Saint Helena people who had resettled in Harlem and Brooklyn. There is also correspondence between Cooley and University of North Carolina sociologist E. C. Branson after Cooley's visit to Chapel Hill in 1927.
Cooley wrote a second series of articles for Survey Graphic that were illustrated by the paintings of Winold Reiss, and in 1930 the Yale University Press published School Acres: An Adventure in Rural Education, her second book. There are a number of letters about the book from Roscoe Conkling Bruce, son of Senator Blanche K. Bruce, editor of Dunbar News ; Jackson Davis, who wrote Paul Kellogg about placing copies of the book in the libraries of all the Rosenwald schools; and others.
On 13 February 1930, there was a dinner in New York City celebrating the 25th anniversary of the arrival of Cooley and House at Penn School. Francis Cope, Jr., spoke at the dinner, and there is an outline of his remarks in the papers. Cooley wrote the Rosenwald Fund on 10 April 1930 that it had been "a splendid year."
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Subseries 1.4. Years of Crisis, 1931-1941.
Most of the correspondence for the 1930s reflects the economic distress of the Great Depression, which hurt Penn School most through the reduced financial resources of its leading supporters. In 1931, Penn was forced to abandon its year-round schedule. In October 1931, there is a poignant series of notes, apparently one from each member of the Penn School staff, accepting a voluntary five percent reduction in salary, and in October 1933, there is a salary list with reductions of up to 25 percent. Later some industrial courses were discontinued, and in 1937 there is an outline of the revised curriculum.
Cooley wrote to the trustees, especially L. Hollingsworth Wood, and others about obtaining additional funds. Her correspondents included Arthur Curtiss James, J. H. Dillard, John H. Towne, Jackson Davis, Trevor Arnett, and W. W. Brierley of the General Education Board, Ralph S. Rounds of the Keith Fund, Edwin R. Embree of the Rosenwald Fund, Frederick M. Keppel and Robert M. Lester of the Carnegie Corporation, and Edward T. Esty of the Alden Trust. Of particular interest is the campaign in 1937-1938, in conjunction with the school's 75th anniversary, for a sustaining fund. See also volume 55.
There are scattered letters from Islanders describing economic difficulties, including Benjamin Barnwell, July-August 1932 and January 1933, and Ethel K. Bailey, wife of the Island physician, who in a letter, July 1935, described her anxiety over the future of Saint Helena. Also in 1935 is a letter from W. Brantley Harvey to Senator James F. Byrnes about the relief rolls in Beaufort County and a list of local families in danger of losing their land for non-payment of taxes.
For help in developing new crops and in obtaining federal relief funds, Cooley turned to W. H. Mills of Clemson College. Mills's letters appear throughout the decade, including comments, September 1933, on the work of the Resettlement Administration; a letter, March 1935, to Harold Evans indicating his support for the Wagner-Costigan anti-lynching bill; and a letter, November 1938, about the ruins on another of the Sea Islands. There is also information on the anti-lynching bill in January 1934.
Penn School throughout this period sought the aid of various New Deal agencies, especially those concerned with rural relief and development. There is correspondence with rural relief administrators, including Rexford Guy Tugwell, R. H. Hudgens, R. F. Kolb, James C. Derieux, and T. J. Woofter. In 1935, there is information on the Saint Helena Island Rehabilitation Project, including lists of applicants for work on the project, and in 1936, correspondence about Resettlement Administration proposals for the Sea Islands.
On 15 November 1937, Clarence C. Pickett, executive secretary of the American Friends Service Committee, wrote Eleanor Roosevelt introducing Rossa B. Cooley, although Cooley was unable to have an interview with Roosevelt because of schedule conflicts. Roosevelt's secretary corresponded from 1939 through 1940 about placing an orphan boy at Penn.
In the midst of its financial crisis, Penn faced another challenge when South Carolina raised its requirements for teacher certification. In 1932, Cooley asked James H. Hope, the state superintendent of education, about accreditation and teacher training at the school, and in 1933 announced the accrediting of the 12th year of work at Penn. In 1936, however, Penn was forced to turn over its teacher training work to South Carolina State College at Orangeburg with which Penn thereafter operated a co-operative program financed in part by the General Education Board. There is material about the program, including correspondence with Raymond Fosdick of the General Education Board in 1940 and with Mabel Carney of Columbia University Teachers College and Jane Ellen McAllister of Miner Teachers College in Washington, D.C., about the Rural Teachers Institute held at Penn in March 1941. See also "Guide to Cooperative Teacher Training Program" in the printed materials.
In August 1940, a hurricane, the greatest storm of its kind to hit Saint Helena Island since 1893, struck Penn School. The intensity of the storm and the repair of damage were the major topics of interest at the school throughout that year and well into 1941. Of special interest are the nearly 200 essays written by the students of Penn, mostly in the form of letters to the principals, dealing with the Great Hurricane Storm of 11 August 1940. These essays are a rare example of the work of Penn School students.
In spite of the setbacks and problems, Cooley and House remained optimistic. Cooley wrote in December 1937 that "the influence of Penn School seems to go farther and farther steadily, and ... to be making a deep dent on attitudes toward Negro education." There is continued correspondence from visitors including W. D. Weatherford in 1931 and 1934; Charles T. Loram in 1932; Albert Bushnell Hart, who had visited Penn 30 years earlier in 1933; Will Alexander in 1934; Edgar T. Thompson in 1936; and Gunnar Myrdal in 1939.
The work of publicizing the school also continued. Of particular interest is correspondence in 1934 about the performance of the Penn School Quartet at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., arranged by Elizabeth Lindsay, wife of the British ambassador and a native of Saint Helena. There are also letters from writers and students interested in the school; an essay by Cooley in 1937 on "Vassar Influence on the Sea Islands of South Carolina"; and letters from John A. Silver, a new trustee, who in June 1938 suggested making a motion picture about Penn School as a fund-raising project.
The film, later called To Live as Free Man, was to prove a final tribute to the work of Cooley and House, for the search had already begun for new leaders to take over the direction of Penn School. Correspondence among Francis Cope, L. Hollingsworth Wood, James E. Gregg, Isabella Curtis, and other trustees about a new principal begins in 1941 and continues for several years.
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Subseries 1.5. Years of Change, 1942-1976.
In 1942 and 1943, there is much correspondence about To Live as Free Men , which premiered in November 1942, but the principal subject of the papers is the selection of new principals. The first reference to Howard Kester as a candidate for the position appears in a letter, 24 October 1942, from Rossa B. Cooley to Francis Cope. In May and June 1943, both Cope and L. Hollingsworth Wood expressed doubt about the Kesters as principals, but Cooley was pleased with a visit from Kester in May, and Kester wrote that he was prepared to accept the position. Included are biographical materials about Kester and letters of recommendation from Fred L. Brownlee of the American Missionary Association, Walter White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Liston Pope of Yale Divinity School, Benjamin E. Mays of Morehouse College, A. D. Beittel of Guilford College, Mordecai W. Johnson of Howard University, and Reinhold Niebuhr of Union Theological Seminary.
According to the trustee minutes (volume 12), Howard and Alice Kester were elected principal and assistant principal on 8 July 1943. Although Cooley wrote, 18 October 1943, to Francis Cope that "this retiring business isn't so easy as I always thought it was," preparations were made for the transition to a new regime, and Howard and Alice Kester arrived on 19 December 1943.
For the next four years the Kesters brought Penn School a wide acquaintance with interracial, trade union, religious, and social reform leaders of the South and the nation. Among their regular correspondents were Liston Pope, Broadus Mitchell, Dave Burgess, H. L. Mitchell, Kirby Page, James Dombrowski, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Ursula Niebuhr. There are also letters from Walter White, Pearl S. Buck, David Lilienthal, DeWitt Wallace, Guy B. Johnson, Walter Sikes, A. Philip Randolph, William Howard Melish, Willard Uphaus, and Louis R. Wilson.
In spite of his pacifist views, Kester continued Penn School's participation in the war, but he made a number of other changes that are reflected in his first report to the trustees on 1 January 1944 and in other papers. After a land survey done by Clemson College, he reorganized the farm program and began a project to repair the school buildings, and he recruited new teachers in an effort to raise the school standards. In 1945, he secured seats on the board of trustees for Benjamin Mays and Joshua Blanton, two African American college presidents, and hired Alice Frank Merriam to run a publicity and fund-raising office in the North.
Unlike Cooley and House, who saw Penn School as a force for improving life on the Island and thus discouraging emigration, Kester saw Penn as a means of preparing its students for life in the world outside and a vehicle for promoting better relations between whites and blacks. Francis Cope, chair of the board of trustees since 1924, wrote repeatedly to his fellow trustees of his dissatisfaction with the Kesters' work and, according to a memo, 12 April 1945, by trustee John Silver, the presence of Cooley and House, who still lived nearby, caused problems for the Kesters. The personal tensions between Francis Cope and Howard Kester intensified, and in 1946, Cope resigned from the board.
A new board, led by chair William E. Cadbury, Paul Brown, Jr., Harold Evans, John Silver, and L. Hollingsworth Wood, realized in January 1948 that Penn School would have to be reorganized if it were to survive in a world of new economic and racial relationships. Ira De A. Reid of Atlanta University headed a team to study Penn School and made suggestions for its future development, and his report, submitted 19 February 1948, recommended changes in the functions and staff of the school. Howard Kester, who had resigned to return to the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, stayed on to supervise the transition, and at the end of the 1948 school year, Penn School gave up its academic responsibilities and turned to community service, not only for the Sea Islands, but for the entire South.
On 25 January 1950, Courtney Siceloff was hired as director of Penn Community Services. With the change in name came also a new program emphasis, a new perspective toward the South, and a new leadership that is reflected in the slight, scattered papers after 1948 in this series. Researchers should also see Series 8. Courtney Siceloff Papers (Addition of 2005) for more information about Penn Community Services, especially for the years 1950 to 1970. Northern domination of the board ended in 1957, with the election of Marion A. Wright of Beaufort, S.C., as chair and James McBride Dabbs, his successor in 1963. The prime concern of Penn Community Services had become community service, not just for the Sea Islands but for the entire southern region. But the past was not forgotten, and the papers record the work of Willie Lee Rose and Edith M. Dabbs in documenting the history of Penn School and Saint Helena Island.
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Subseries 1.6. Undated Materials.
Among the undated papers are miscellaneous correspondence and writings of and about Laura Towne, Ellen Murray and Alice Lathrop, including an essay on "Ellen's Frank,"a former slave; a description of the arrival of Sherman's troops on the Sea Islands in 1865; and two descriptions of Laura Towne and Ellen Murray by contemporaries. There are mostly routine letters to Rossa Cooley, Grace House, and Howard Kester from visitors and contributors to the school and board members, including a five-page letter describing the impact of World War II on the Island and letters about getting surplus military goods following the war; a handbill by A.C. Reynolds exhorting the wives and mothers of St. Helena to disarm their sons and husbands; and other miscellaneous materials.
There follow reports and writings about the school; a story by Mrs. James R. Macdonald; a sketch of Uncle Sam Polite, a former slave who lived to be over one hundred years old; and a series of reports, applications, accounts and memos of the Co-operative Society, many related to peanuts; and a copy of the Society's articles of incorporation.
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Subseries 1.7. Bills, Receipts, and Banking Records, 1872-1951.
See also series 2 for financial materials.
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Series 2. Volumes, 1862-1960 and undated.
See also subseries 1.7. for financial materials.
The following description is based on the Guide to the Microfilm Edition of the Penn School Papers, 1862-1976 (1977).
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Series 3. Printed Materials, 1890-1977.
The following description is based on the Guide to the Microfilm Edition of the Penn School Papers, 1862-1976 (1977).
Researchers interested in Penn Community Services, especially from 1950 to 1970, should also see Series 8. Courtney Siceloff Papers (Addition of 2005).
Among the newspaper clippings, 1902-1956 and undated, are articles about the history of Saint Helena Island and Penn School and about specific events at Penn School and on the Island; general descriptions of Penn and its programs; notices of speeches and visits by Rossa B. Cooley, Grace B. House, and several trustees; other articles about school faculty and trustees, especially George Foster Peabody; and reviews of Homes of the Freed and School Acres. Included are articles from newspapers in South Carolina, New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, although few are identified by source.
There are also articles and pamphlets from Survey Graphic, Southern Workman, Outlook, and other publications concerning Penn School. Among the writers are Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Laura Towne, Charles T. Loram, Henry Wilder Foote, and Joshua E. Blanton. Of particular interest are the "Reminiscences" written in 1926 by Annie Heacock, a member of the Port Royal Experiment who taught near Beaufort from 1863 to 1869; a 1934 "Report on A Visit to North America Under the Auspices of the Carnegie Corporation" by Oswin Boys Bull of Meaeru, Basutoland, and a similar report by visitors from Zanzibar; and a folio of material by and about George Foster Peabody. There is also a series of articles by Rossa B. Cooley and Grace B. House, including those printed in Survey Graphic that became Homes of the Freed and a copy of the book itself.
Miscellaneous printed material is primarily fund-raising and promotional literature, including broadsides; pamphlets; Penn School calendars; reprints of speeches by Charles W. Dabney, 1903, Robert Russa Moton, 1923, and others; and yearbooks, 1913-1943, of the Penn School Club of Boston. There are circulars, announcements, invitations to and programs of school events and other school materials, including a 1940 "Guide to Cooperative Teacher Training Program" by Trudelle W. Wimbush of South Carolina State College. Also included are a 1945-1946 catalog and issues of the Penn School Chronicle , 1896-1897; "Plantation Pictures of Saint Helena Island," 1921-1923; and Penn School Journal, 1943.
Included also are broadsides and invitations relating to the Saint Helena Cooperative Credit Union and copies, 1921 and undated, of the Union's rules and studies and promotional material issued by Penn Community Services, including a 1954 newsletter.
There are also annual reports, 1890-1893, 1898, 1901, 1908-1930, 1934-1947, 1951, which are a useful introduction to Penn School. Most include rosters of the board of trustees and school staff; descriptions of school and community activities during the year and changes in the school program; a brief history of the school; and comments on the Penn philosophy and program. Some also contain an outline of the school curriculum, lists of benefactors, and lists of school needs.
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Series 4. Photographs, 1860s-1962.
The following description is based on the Guide to the Microfilm Edition of the Penn School Papers, 1862-1976 (1977). See notes on the image identification number code below.
The Penn School Papers contain about 3,000 photographs, the earliest of which date from the 1860s and the latest from 1962. Like other materials in this collection, the photographs are fewest during the years 1862-1890 and 1948-1962. Most of them date from 1905 to 1944, the tenure of Rossa B. Cooley and Grace B. House as teachers and principals at Penn School. They are found chiefly in 21 photograph albums, nine of which seem to have been assembled by the principals for display. Several others were more hastily assembled by the principals, while the rest came from visitors and close friends of Penn School.
One hundred and twenty-four prints made from 8x10 and 5x7 glass plates exposed by Leigh Richmond Miner are included. In addition, there are about 1,000 unmounted photographs. Most of these are original prints of various sizes, but several hundred are prints made from negatives that were originally part of the collection. Among these unmounted photographs are black-and-white prints of the water colors painted by Winold Reiss.
The amateur and professional photographers who took these pictures were school trustees and faculty, friends of the principals, and other visitors, all of whom were white. Cooley and House are the sources of many of the photographs, but it was not uncommon for visitors to send their prints and often their negatives to the principals. The major photographers were:
Hubbard and Mix, Practical Photographers: These photographers ran a professional studio in Beaufort, S.C., during the 1860s, where they photographed Laura M. Towne and others from Saint Helena. They also seem to have come to Saint Helena and other Sea Islands to photograph freed slaves and slave cabins.
Samuel A. Cooley: A photographer for the federal forces during the Civil War, Cooley worked out of Savannah, Hilton Head Island, and Beaufort after the war and took several of the photographs in the collection.
Helen C. Jenks: The niece of Laura M. Towne and a trustee of Penn School, Jenks was an interested amateur photographer. Her photographs date from about 1890 to 1912.
Rossa B. Cooley and Grace B. House: They were teachers and principals at Penn School and their pictures date from 1904 to 1944. From internal evidence, it is probable that Rossa B. Cooley took most of the photographs. The captions of the album pictures are in her handwriting, as are those on the accompanying negative envelopes. Her pictures comprise the largest part of the Penn School photographs.
Francis R. Cope, Jr.: A trustee and later the chair of the board of trustees of Penn School, Cope was an avid amateur photographer and one of the best to photograph Penn School and Saint Helena. His pictures date from 1901 to 1944.
Isabella Curtis: She was a trustee of Penn School and a friend of the principals. She took photographs on visits made between 1915 and 1930.
Leigh Richmond Miner: He was an instructor in drawing at Hampton Institute and a professional photographer who visited Penn several times between 1907 and 1923. He used a view camera and exposed about 150 plates. Most of his photographs of Saint Helena were published in a volume edited by Edith M. Dabbs, Face of an Island: Leigh Richmond Miner's Photographs of Saint Helena Island (Columbia, S.C.: R. L. Bryan, 1970).
Lewis W. Hine: An important figure in American photography in the 20th century, Hine worked for the Survey Graphic at various times in the 1910s and the 1920s. He was an advocate of child labor laws and is perhaps most famous for his pictures of factory children. He visited Penn School in November 1919. Two photographs, probably from this visit, illustrated Rossa B. Cooley's article, "The Homes of the Freed," published in the Survey Graphic in October 1923.
Mary Isabel House: A sister of Grace B. House, she made many visits over the years.
Margaret Noyes: A friend of the principals, she visited the Island in 1937, taking a great number of photographs.
As might be expected, these and other photographers differed both in their abilities and in their choice of equipment. Among the early amateurs to use the small box cameras on the Island, Helen C. Jenks and Francis R. Cope, Jr., had perhaps the liveliest eye for composition. Jenks sometimes kept records of her exposures, indicating more than casual interest in the medium. This interest is further borne out by the 5x7 glass plates in the collection that are retouched enlargements of small prints appearing in her albums. Cope took many striking compositions of Island scenes that reveal a very proficient photographer with a flair for the dramatic. The different sizes of his negatives indicate that Cope owned a variety of cameras between 1900 and the 1940s. Rossa B. Cooley also used the box camera, but responded more to its utility as a recording instrument than to the pleasures of making beautiful pictures.
Alone among 20th-century photographers of Penn School, Leigh Richmond Miner used a view camera, a cumbersome machine using very slow film that required long exposures on a sturdy tripod. His photographs consequently lack the candid, spontaneous quality of the pictures taken by Jenks and Cope. His careful poses of people at work are more reminiscent of 19th-century photographs. But the large negative utilized by the view camera captured a wealth of sharp detail that the smaller negatives missed, and Miner's photographs are quite valuable for the study of Island dress, architecture, and tools.
A variety of motives were at work in the making of the photographs in this collection. Perhaps the simplest motive was provided by the age itself. When Helen C. Jenks began photographing Saint Helena in the 1890s, photography had entered its popular phase. George Eastman had patented his Kodak in 1888, and many people could afford this simple camera (Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography [New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1964], pp. 89-94.) Instead of presenting oneself at a professional studio for the standard portrait set against a column or exotic backdrop, one could arrange the family under a favorite linden tree and push the shutter of the small, black camera. It was the age of the snapshot.
Thus there is an exuberance in many of the early photographs of both the young Cope and Cooley and the middle-aged Jenks. It is an exuberance belonging to the youth of photography itself. Saint Helena was picturesque and exotic to these northerners more familiar with city avenues and the drawing room than with live oaks dripping with Spanish moss and African American Islanders living in primitive cabins.
And so with their cameras at the ready these men and women ranged about the Island and around the school grounds, on foot and in horse-drawn buggies, registering on film the strange and beautiful aspects of Saint Helena. They confronted the Islanders in their homes and on the roads, importuning them, sometimes successfully, to "smile for the camera." And of course they took home with them the obligatory group portraits full of faces wincing bravely into the sun. The impulse behind this kind of picture-taking, as George Eastman had recognized in 1892, was the desire for "personal pictures or memoranda of [the amateurs'] everyday life, objects, places or people that interest them in travel & c." (Ibid., p. 94.) These snapshots were gathered in albums, set out for the entertainment of visitors and the amusement of children.
But the collection is more than the naive statements of northern whites witnessing the exotic Saint Helena. It was clear to the principals and to others that the photograph was a valuable institutional record. Cooley and House especially had a strong historic sense, a sense that they were engaged in an important undertaking whose development should be documented.
Thus among the Penn School photographs are hundreds of individual students, of graduating classes, of teachers, and of school buildings under construction and completed. The principals carefully recorded the numerous calendar events at the school: the Farmers' Fairs beginning in 1906, the Planting Week functions, the picnics and trips. They and others brought their cameras to the 50th Anniversary ceremonies in 1912, to the dedication of the Frissell Memorial Community Building in 1925, to the 75th Anniversary of Penn School in 1937, and to the reunion of the Saint Helena Quartette in 1953. In these photographs are the young and old faces of Joshua and Linnie Blanton; Benjamin Boyd; A. J. Brown; Rossa B. Cooley; Hollis Burke Frissell; Grace B. House; Howard and Alice Kester; James P. King; Robert Russa Moton; George Foster Peabody; Benjamin H. Washington; and numerous men, women, and children of Saint Helena Island.
Photographs taken to record Penn's progress could also be used to publicize it, and in the struggle to encourage contributions to one of the first schools for African Americans in the South, the principals were well aware of the value of photography. As early as 1906, the principals were contrasting in photographs the demonstration corn acres to the corn grown by the old method in order to dramatize the improvement in the yield. After the storm of 1911, they photographed the Islanders' cooperative efforts to rebuild their homes. Photographs illustrated Rossa B. Cooley's articles in the Survey Graphic, her books, and Penn's annual reports. Leigh Richmond Miner's lovely photographs may have been conscious attempts to publicize Penn School in the way that Frances Benjamin Johnston's photographs had publicized Hampton Institute in 1900.
Though many of these photographs are personal documents recording private moments, in the main the Penn School photographs were meant to be seen. They were public documents promoting a social ideal and are an important part of the Penn School Papers. For where the manuscripts reveal the school mostly from an administrative point of view, the photographs reveal more directly and concretely the people of Saint Helena and specific details of life there over a 100-year period.
These photographs are arranged with the albums appearing first in chronological order followed by the unmounted photographs arranged as follows: 19th-century photographs, published photographs; photographs by Leigh Richmond Miner, photographs by Margaret Noyes, and miscellaneous unmounted photographs arranged chronologically. Description in quotation marks is taken either from the print or the negative of the image. Minor editing of the quoted description has been done to facilitate searching.
IMAGE IDENTIFICATION NUMBER CODE: The image identification number is derived from frame numbers in the microfilm edition of the Penn School Papers.
Images in photograph albums: The location of original images in photograph albums is indicated in this finding aid by photograph album (PA) numbers (e.g., PA-3615/78). Photograph album numbers are not used in forming the image identification number. Identification numbers are generally composed of the microfilm frame number, l for left-hand page or r for right-hand page in the original photograph album, and a lower-case letter indicating the position of the image on the page. Positions are read from top-left to top-right, then bottom-left to bottom-right. For example, image 0001ra is listed in this finding aid as physically located in PA-3615/78. Its identification number indicates that it is on a left-hand page and is the image closest to the upper left-hand corner of that page. In the microfilm edition, this image is found in frame 0001. Note that some images from photograph albums do not have left or right designations, probably because the page in question was loose in the album.
Unmounted images: Identification numbers are composed of the microfilm frame number and a letter indicating how many photographs are in that frame. For example, image identification numbers 0814a, 0814b, 0814c show that there are three images in frame 0814. Image identification number 1012 shows that there is only one image in frame 1012.
If the photographer's name is known it is listed.
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Subseries 4.1. Photograph Albums, 1899-1944.
Photograph albums are closed due to extreme fragility. Researchers must use microfilm copies.