University of Southern Maine finds hidden-away notes from students in the 1800s

WMTW, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN MAINE, CNN

By Jacob Murphy

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    GORHAM, Maine (WMTW) — In 1806, the Academy Building on the University of Southern Maine’s Gorham campus was built. At the time, it was a kind of private high school. The building was eventually absorbed into USM’s campus and two centuries later, the building still stands.

Dr. Libby Bischof is a historian at the university. She says when it was first built, students would travel from nearby towns to attend.

“This just is testament to how much the people of Gorham cared about the secondary education of their children,” Bischof said.

The historical building now functions as studio space for art students at USM, but professors are able to find even greater educational value in it.

“Teaching history here, as a Maine historian, it’s incredible to have these buildings because they become our classrooms, the landscape becomes our classroom. And you don’t have to imagine what the past look like,” Bischof said.

The Academy Building is still used by students today. This photo was taken after recent restoration work done to it. For the last two summers, the university worked on a restoration project for the building. Historical construction techniques from when it was originally built were used.

“If you were to see the condition that it was in before we did this, it was kind of upsetting,” said David Burrows, the project manager. “It looks a lot like it would have been built in 1806. The details, the techniques are all very authentic to that time frame.”

However, during construction they came across an unexpected obstacle. Underneath the facade, wood rot had started to spread through the building’s structure. Suddenly, they were looking at a more intensive and more expensive project.

Already midway through the project, they were able to secure the funding they needed to continue their work restoring the building.

As they removed the rot, they made a discovery: Old notes dating as far back as the 1800s were found in the floors and walls.

“Some of them are sums and calculations and lists. Things that you would expect. But, there’s also really funny caricatures of teachers, sort of focusing on prominent features like big noses,” Bischof said. “This is– this is sort of like the text message or the Snapchat that they’re sending in the middle of class, that they shouldn’t be.”

Some of the old notes found inside the academy building contained doodles and other drawings from past students Everything that was found was sent over in boxes to the university’s special collections. Susie Bock is the coordinator there, and she’s working on preserving the notes.

She describes that process as flattening each piece and storing them inside acid-free folders. Some of the pieces she is considering digitizing, which would also help make sense of the more faded fragments.

Bock says this kind of work is important and that, down the line, researchers and historians can use it.

“People’s knowledge and interest changes, interpretation of the primary resources is going to change, but that’s why it’s important to keep the primary resources so that we can do those interpretations,” Bock said. “It’s an important part of keeping history from being erased.”

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