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Abby Williams Hill (’07)

On December 4, 2024

In 2024-25

Abby Rhoda Williams Hill (1861-1943) grew up in the town of Grinnell (her parents being some of the first settlers who arrived with J.B. Grinnell in 1854). Hill loved drawing and painting from an early age: she taught local art classes, studied art at the college, and then travelled to Chicago, New York, and Hamburg (Germany) for more formal training. She returned to Grinnell to teach briefly at the college; but then moved to the Seattle area where she gained a national reputation for painting western landscapes after being commissioned by the Great Northern Railway to do a series of plein air landscape paintings of national parks and scenic areas served by the railroad. These paintings were displayed at the Word’s Fair, to much acclaim, and were made available to a wider public in the form of a popular booklet. Hill went on to paint hundreds of landscapes throughout the West, and always brought her children camping with her for these extended en plen air sessions (pictured below). Her journals describe many family adventures: evading forest fires, negotiating with bears, avoiding rattlesnakes, and one particularly harrowing encounter with a mountain lion that chased them. Despite making a home in the West, Hill returned frequently to Grinnell to visit family, friends, and members of the college community. She donated several works to the college (see below) and to the Stewart Library, in town.

Painting by Abby Williams Hill (’07) that was donated to the College. It used to hang prominently in the Old Library, Carnegie Hall, along with another of her landscapes.

Abby Williams Hill, with her four children, on a plein air excursion to Yellowstone National Park (c. 1906)

Thanksgiving 1924: The “Electric Gridiron” Comes to Grinnell

By admin

On November 25, 2024

In 2024-25, Uncategorized

On Thanksgiving Day—100 years ago—many of the Grinnell students who remained on campus gathered in the auditorium of A.R.H to “watch” their football team play the last game of the season against their rival, Creighton, in Omaha. The college marching band assembled in the auditorium, along with Grinnell’s cheerleading squad, but all eyes were on the new “Grid-Graph” machine, which weighed nearly 1,000 pounds, and was designed to visualize remote football matches via instant telegraphy, electrical switches, and lights, so that fans could follow the action in real time, play-by-play (in an era before television coverage, and when even radio broadcasting of games was limited to a few nationally chosen matches). In the 1920s, Grid-Graph became all the rage in college sports, and Grinnell was excited to sign its own contract in 1924 to bring the marvels of modern technology (the “electric gridiron”) to campus.

Photograph of a Grid-Graph “in action” in the 1920s

Grinnellians posing before the Thanksgiving match in 1924 (note: the player on the far right is Hap Moran, who went on to a successful career as a starter in the NFL for more than a decade)

Forest Bathing in the Conservation Era

By admin

On November 18, 2024

In 2024-25

This week marks the end of the Fall program of “forest bathing” at Grinnell, in which students can sign up to spend part of a Tuesday afternoon walking through woodlands and immersing themselves in nature. Although billed as a modern wellness practice—and a form of environmental health or environmental medicine—the essential goal of these trips would have been quite familiar to Henry Shoemaker Conard, who taught Biology at Grinnell College one hundred years ago. Conard, who also served as president of the Iowa Conservation Association, advocated for a system of state parks in Iowa that would provide wilderness preserves for study, recreation, and immersion. He regularly took students on extended camping and hiking trips through Pine Creek State Park (in Eldora) as pictured here. Conard also helped organize similar, albeit shorter, trips for local school children to state parks and preserves. And in the 1930s, Conard was hired as a “Ranger-Naturalist” to lead extensive hiking parties through Yellowstone National Park in the summers, blending science, recreation, and wellness that were seen as inter-connected elements of the conservation movement in the Progressive era.

Gwendolyn Brooks at Grinnell

By admin

On November 11, 2024

In 2024-25

Before GWSS became a major—or even a concentration—Grinnell had the Noun Program in Women studies and the Noun Chair in Women’s Studies (both endowed by Louis Rosenfield Noun in 1986). One of the first major events the Noun program sponsored was a large symposium in the Fall of 1988, entitled “Rethinking the Family From Multicultural Perspectives” (see the brochure posted here). The keynote event of that conference was a reading by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Gwendolyn Brooks, who was one of the defining voices of the 20th century (pictured here with three Grinnell Students behind her). This was not Brooks’ first visit to Grinnell, however. In 1972, students invited Brooks to headline the Black Martyrs Weekend event, which involved leading a workshop on poetry in the morning (captured in this picture showing Brooks and a student in the South Lounge), and then reading her own work in the evening.

Gwendolyn Brooks at 1988 symposium

Brooks leading a Poetry workshop in South Lounge, 1972

Rethinking_the_family_Noun_Symposium_1988 (Click here for full symposium brochure)

Elections Past & Grinnell’s Program in Practical Political Education (PPPE)

By admin

On November 4, 2024

In 2024-25

Elections Past & Grinnell’s Program in Practical Political Education (PPPE)

These images, from 1960, show students participating in full-blown, mock conventions for the Democratic party and the Republican party, as part of Grinnell College’s “Program in Practical Political Education” (PPPE) that ran from 1959 to 1970. Under the leadership of Prof. C. Edwin Gilmour, and funded largely by outside grants, the PPPE aimed to encourage students to become involved in day-to-day politics, even partisan politics, through a mixture of training, summer internships, funded fieldwork, political science “labs” that involved campaigns, election, or administrative experience, and a steady stream of state, local, and national politicians who came to Grinnell to give talks, teach short courses, or to work with students for a more extended period of time as “politicians-in-residence.” On election nights, the PPPE “caucus room” became the place on campus to watch coverage of the incoming election results.

Autumnal Landscapes of the Past

By admin

On October 18, 2024

In 2024-25

As Fall arrives, and leaves start to change color throughout the Midwest, it’s worth remembering some of the distinctive autumnal features of our campus landscape that have disappeared. One of those was “the Grove”— a parcel of the campus planted with trees that turned gold, crimson, and auburn each Fall (and is now home to the eastern half of the Noyes Science Center and its parking lot). The other space was the college’s arboretum and botanical gardens, located across Sixth Avenue, on the large plot of land that eventually became the home of St. Paul’s Episcopal church. In their heyday, both locations provided a calm retreat where members of the campus community could enjoy a bit of nature, particularly during the seasonal changes of Fall and Spring.

The Campus Grove (postcard)

Photograph of Grinnell Arboretum & Botanic Garden

The “Encampment” Tradition at Grinnell College

By admin

On October 9, 2024

In 2024-25

In 1960, the Student Government Association and President Howard Bowen agreed to hold a multi-day retreat, off-campus, that would bring together a select group of students, faculty, and administrators to discuss the “Purposes and Values of a Liberal Arts Education” at Grinnell. This retreat, or “Encampment,” as they called it, became a recurring tradition, in which about 100 members of the campus community would gather at some retreat site in October, each year, to spend a few days informally discussing broader issues of campus culture and curriculum as well as tackling concrete issues, needs, or policies (on a more practical level). The tradition of encampments was seen as one of the more distinctive aspects of campus life and shared governance at Grinnell.

Images: Cyclone Yearbook 1964 and Scarlett & Black special edition, 10/11/66.

encampment in 1964 cyclone yearbook (click here for full sized pdf)

S&B 1966 coverage of encampments at Grinnell (click here for full sized pdf)

Special October Edition: How to Choose a Major at Grinnell College

By admin

On October 8, 2024

In 2024-25

how to choose a major (click here for full size pdf)

How to Choose a Major at Grinnell College

Since October is the month when all departments (and many concentrations) host welcome sessions to provide more information for first- and second-year students thinking about their academic futures, I thought it would be appropriate to share the wisdom and insights of the Scarlett & Black editors (from 20 years ago), who created this diagram to guide the process of discernment. You path to enlightenment begins here…

Dedication Ceremonies

By admin

On October 3, 2024

In 2024-25

Dedication Ceremonies

While the large festivities surrounding the dedication of Renfrow Hall happened this weekend, there was another, earlier, ceremony that took place on January 30th–a “topping off” ritual (pictured here) in which select members of the community were invited to sign the final beam that would be hoisted into place to complete the structure of Renfrow Hall. The ritual of “topping off” has deep roots in Scandinavian and British history, but it is just one of a number of builder’s rites that have evolved over the centuries. Most of Grinnell’s early structures, in fact, had “foundation deposit” ceremonies in which dignitaries gathered important documents, signatures, coins, and other objects that they placed into a symbolic copper box, which they then deposited behind the cornerstone or foundation stone of a new building. These have often been discovered when the older buildings are torn down, such as the example pictured in this 1972 article from the S&B, that discusses the deposit box found when the women’s gym was torn down that summer. Some of the contents of these earlier boxes was placed in a special time capsule that was ceremonially embedded into the floor of the new Burling Library at its dedication in 1958, with instructions to be opened in 2058. If you’re someone who likes scavenger hunts, I’d encourage you to find the plaque for this time capsule in Burling (it’s in a publicly accessible area).

Edith Renfrow Smith’s Graduation Photographs

By admin

On September 28, 2024

In 2024-25

Davis Middle School Graduation

Edith Renfrow college graduation

graduation from Chicago Teacher's College

Honorary Doctorate

Edith Renfrow Smith’s Graduation Photographs

As we come together to celebrate the dedication of Renfrow Hall, and to celebrate the amazing life and accomplishments of Edith Renfrow Smith ’37, Grinnell College is fortunate enough to have (in its archives) four graduation photographs of Edith, ranging over 90 years, from her eighth-grade graduation in town (in 1929), through to her honorary doctorate at Grinnell in 2019. The other two photographs include her 1937 Grinnell College graduation and her 1954 graduation from Chicago Teacher’s College.