And today’s students don’t trudge uphill both ways to Commons for dinner in a foot of snow like everyone used to, either!

But wait, upon closer look, there is a place on campus where time slows to a whisper and research goes old school; where sleeves roll up, and backs hunch over, and where, this past year, two student-sleuths went searching to understand one of Beloit’s most important historical figures, using handwritten diaries he kept in the early part of the 20th century as their main source of information.

Catherine Ashelford’09 (Byron, Ill.) and Carly Santoro’09 (Glen Ellyn, Ill.) spent the last spring semester of their college careers camped out in the College Archives, researching Irving Maurer, a 1904 graduate who served as Beloit’s beloved fourth president from 1924-1942. If you’ve ever wondered where that intangible Beloitness comes from, Maurer’s presidency is a good place to start.

“He was just kind of a bigger-than-life-character. He was humble, but almost fictional in a sense. [It’s the] things he came across and the things he did—studying at Beloit, going to Yale, all the people he ran into—Coolidge, Roosevelt, Helen Keller,” recounts Ashelford. She calls the Archives a “hidden treasure” and trumpets the importance of holding an original document in one’s hands.

To read Ashelford and Santoro’s original paper on President Maurer, click here.

In their research paper, which focused on Maurer’s life in the years leading up to World War II, the students explain that Maurer was an ordained Congregationalist minister who had a very liberal interpretation of religion and the Bible. But he was also a man whose philosophies were strongly spiritual and steeped in family values and traditional gender roles. He conveyed all of this to Beloit students over his 18 years as president through letters and weekly addresses to the student body and simply by interacting with them one-on-one. He cared deeply about the College and its students in a way that was truly tangible. He was a rare man who kept a rare daily diary for 40 years of his life.

For much of this past spring, Ashelford and Santoro wound their way down the aqua-green carpeted stairs of the College library, past the rows of old bound copies of the Round Table, and into the far southeastern corner, to the College’s cramped archive, where piles of books and papers blanket tables and line walkways like an old used bookstore.

It’s in this priceless archive where you’ll also find the quiet and contemplative Fred Burwell’86, the College’s archivist and a devotee of curiosity and research. He’s also a fellow who knows good writing—he used to edit his own literary magazine, in fact.

Burwell came to Beloit from Philly for college, got a job with the library and the Beloit Fiction Journal, and eventually set down roots. He’s finished one novel, is at work on another, and has a third ruminating on his mind’s back burner. While he reserves the summer months for his own writing, the bulk of Burwell’s career is devoted to this archive and to serving as guardian of the soul of Beloit.

Burwell’s devotion to teaching others led him to team up with the history department to co-teach a class with Associate Professor of History Ellen Joyce on archival research. It was through this class, first offered in 2006, that Santoro and Ashelford were introduced to the archive and to the concepts inherent in doing archival research. From there, they developed their senior project in consultation with Burwell, who had recently received the Maurer diaries.

Jeff Woods

Members of Irving Maurer’s family brought his diaries back to Beloit after they had a digitally scanned copy made for themselves. At a reception celebrating the gift in the College library, from left, are Beloit parent and Maurer’s granddaughter-in-law Marienne Skinner, Maurer’s grandson Sterling “Skip” Skinner and his wife, Lynn (also Beloit parents), and College Archivist Fred Burwell’86 at far right. Megan Fitch, director of Information Services and Resources, is facing away from the camera.

Burwell had been delighted just months earlier to learn that Skip Skinner, Maurer’s grandson—on behalf of the Maurer family—would be donating to the College all 40 years worth of the original diaries, the red-tipped pages bound into several dozen volumes, a monumentally important gift. With no time to dig into the diaries himself, Burwell steered the students in Maurer’s direction. Burwell, who for years has written in his own diary and also keeps a miniature spiral notebook in his pocket to jot down thoughts as they arise during the day, enjoys learning about people and their experiences by reading their own accounts of their lives.

“Maurer was probably my favorite president,” Burwell explains. He attributes this to reading Maurer’s writing. “He just had a warm tone to his letters—a friendly, avuncular tone and a lot of affection for the College.”

Burwell stresses that archival research isn’t simply another thing for students to list as a source in a paper’s bibliography; it’s a completely different experience that offers them the chance to become intimately involved with their subject. He calls it “paper archaeology.”

“I think there’s still something to be said for that tactile experience. Holding that letter in your hand and seeing that handwriting. You get a little bit of a shivery feel. I know that a letter from Helen Keller to President Maurer—when the relatives saw that, and they didn’t know it existed—they were really moved by it. Because Maurer had a blind son, and he wrote to Helen Keller, and she wrote him back and signed the letter by hand with these big block letters,” Burwell recounts.

The Maurer diary collection is an important gift in its own right, but it also allows this great Beloit president to continue to teach contemporary students by giving them the opportunity to sit and scour his writing—to learn from what is written, but also to gain important lessons from the act of the scouring itself.

“I don’t think you can do the kind of paper or in-depth research that Carly and Catherine did or a major project …. using only online stuff. Actually it disappoints me sometimes when students have that opportunity in the archives class or in other classes and they go off to Wikipedia and Google or whatever,” Burwell laments. “These are wonderful [online] tools, but I hope that there will still be a place for the kind of research you do right in an archive.”

Ashelford and Santoro say that this research experience simply felt different from anything they had done in the past.

“I think there’s a lot more of a personal connection when you use primary sources; that’s what the archives class is all about. I hadn’t worked with primary sources in the actual physical form until that point,” Ashelford stresses. “There’s definitely something different [about holding] a book that Maurer held.”

Beatrice McKenzie, an assistant professor of history who co-advised the students with Burwell on their special project, notes the value of the diaries as something apart from other resources. “I would venture to guess the hours that Catherine and Carly spent reading Maurer’s diaries were some of the most rewarding study hours of their college careers,” she says. “This is in part because it was a diary they were reading.”

Zane Williams

Catherine Ashelford’09, left, and Carly Santoro’09 prepare to give a presentation on Irving Maurer (1904), Beloit’s fourth president, pictured in a vintage photo that is part of the Archives’ holdings. The students’ research drew in large part on Maurer’s 14,000 pages of daily diary entries, a recent gift to the College.

Indeed, Ashelford relays one entry she read in Maurer’s diary from 1940. He wrote about taking a leisurely drive south from the College late one spring day to the rural town of Byron, Illinois. (We can assume he arrived safely, since one of the personal “commandments” he lived by was to drive safely!) In Byron, Maurer stood before a gathering to celebrate the town’s high school graduates. He had come to deliver the commencement address and entice some of Byron’s brightest to follow him back north to Beloit for college.

History came full circle in a sense in the winter of 2009 when Ashelford, herself from Byron, cracked open one of those diaries and read of Maurer’s trip to her hometown decades beforehand.

Thanks to the gift of these diaries, the College’s archives course, and a special project, Ashelford and Santoro are now closer than anyone to being experts on Irving Maurer’s time at Beloit College—two undergraduate researchers, turning hundreds of pages of diaries and squinting at sometimes erratic penmanship left by Maurer long ago—all in order to better understand the footsteps through the past left by this remarkable man.

The students seem genuinely surprised by all the attention their project drew last spring. Besides writing the paper, they delivered a formal symposium presentation, put together an exhibit on President Maurer for the College library display cases, and gave a talk at an event that honored Maurer’s descendants during their visit to campus.

“I know it has solidified my fondness for archival research and research in general,” Santoro says of the project. “It’s given us a lot of practice for doing more of these types of things and doing a more multi-tiered research project.” She adds that it was thrilling to present at Symposium Day in front of some of the “bigwigs on campus,” including Interim President Dick Niemiec’65.

Burwell agrees that these types of projects can make a long-term impact. He had a similar experience as a student when he first worked on the Beloit Fiction Journal as assistant editor.

“I feel like the kind of work that they’ve done is something they’ll carry with them through their lives,” Burwell says.

So Maurer, ever the great teacher and friend of the College and its students, can still affect young people today, just as he did during his time at Beloit—as long as students are willing to disconnect from the electronic world, descend into the basement of the library, and search to uncover stories of the past.

John Morgan’96 writes about science, the environment, history, health, and more. He vividly remembers daily trudges to and from Commons in several feet of snow, uphill both ways! But seriously, he, too, recently realized the value of archival research after he and his wife began delving into the history of the people who built and inhabited their 150-year-old Wisconsin house.

Dear Diary The thoughtful, in-depth diaries of College President Irving Maurer focus on a pivotal time in history. Maurer led his alma mater through the Great Depression and the build-up to World War II. He is also noted for preserving Beloit’s financial health during tough times while overseeing the addition of many of the College’s legacy facilities, such as Morse-Ingersoll Hall, the Wright Museum of Art, and Strong Stadium. Starting as a student in 1901, Maurer recorded his thoughts for more than 40 years and finished with an entry on the day he died unexpectedly during routine surgery, while he was still Beloit’s president. Maurer’s daughter, Margaret Maurer Gibson’35, first lent the diaries to Dave Mason’49 in the late 1990s, when Mason was writing a history of Beloit College. After the pages were digitally scanned, the Maurer family gave the bound originals to Beloit last winter. Handwritten diaries are among College Archivist Fred Burwell’s favorite resources, and he says the College is always eager to receive them, even those not directly tied to Beloit College. A sampling of other diaries currently available in the Archives includes: • Diaries by two students from Beloit’s first class, Joseph Collie and Stephen Peet (1851). Collie reputedly walked 75 miles from his Mineral Point, Wis., home to attend Beloit. Beloit holds copies of his diaries from 1866-1870 and a year’s worth of originals from 1901-1902. Peet documents student life at Beloit in the 1850s, including a graphic account of drinking too much hard cider. • The Thomas S. McClelland diaries from 1860-1862. McClelland wrote one of the most interesting student diaries in the library’s holdings, according to Burwell. They cover Lincoln’s election and the coming of the U.S. Civil War. A student transcribed and annotated these diaries several years ago, and they are available through the Archives Web site: www.beloit.edu/archives. • T.H. Chrischilles (1912) kept extraordinary, illustrated diaries as a Beloit student from 1908 to 1910. (Beloit holds facsimiles of a portion of these diaries.) In his first-hand accounts of student life, Chrischilles mentions noteworthy historical events, such as seeing Halley’s comet in 1910 and witnessing the closing of the College that same year because of Scarlet Fever. But the beauty of his diary is in the details of college life, both in words and pictures. Chrischilles created miniature works of art on nearly every page. • A diary by gifted Professor of English Bink Noll (at Beloit from 1953-54 and 1961-86). Noll wrote in his diary as a student at Princeton University, chronicling among other things how he grappled with the decision to reject a career in medicine for one in literature. • The Donald Murray diaries. Murray was a modern languages professor from the 1930s through the 1970s, whose diaries begin in the early1960s. Among his accounts of contemporary Beloit issues are the ups and downs of the Beloit Plan

Beloit College Diaries in the Archives

---