Archive Angel: Clara Regina Ludwig '37
December 10, 2007
Posted: December 10, 2007For more than 25 years, Clara Regina Ludwig '37, former director of MHC admission, has been preparing written summaries of materials in the College Archives and Special Collections.
It's hard to imagine that student life at Mount Holyoke in 2007 bears much similarity to student life here in 1903. But consider the following annotations from the letters of Dorothy Firman 1906: "Sure she will flunk all midyears; the prom men were a 'punk lot'--seen only 2 or 3 decent looking ones … Hungry and sleepy all the time …Can now dress in 5 minutes…. Hoping for Wilder next year."
There is probably no one in the world with deeper knowledge and understanding of the vagaries of student life at Mount Holyoke since its founding in 1837 than Clara Regina Ludwig '37 (known as "Reggie"), who recently drafted the foregoing notes while reading and summarizing the Firman letters. This collection is the 247th group of letters and journals Ludwig has worked through since she began volunteering at the College Archives and Special Collections in 1982. Before embarking on her work at the archives, Ludwig served as the College's director of admission from 1958 till 1981.
These letters have opened for Ludwig a unique window on the lives of Mount Holyoke women, both their experiences as students here and afterwards. She has vicariously lived through cataclysmic events such as the 1896 fire that destroyed the Mount Holyoke Seminary Building, where students and teachers had lived and worked since the College opened in 1837; the Great Depression of the 1930s; and even the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1899-1900.
One aspect of life at Mount Holyoke that has changed significantly is social habits. Ludwig noted a reference in Firman's letters to President Mary Woolley's disapproval of the custom of "open houses," when young men were entertained at tea parties in the students' rooms during Prom in February. Woolley ended the practice, saying it was not suitable for men to be in student rooms where they dressed and slept. Ludwig was amused to find a similar protest some 60 years later by President Richard Gettell (who served from 1957-1968), complaining about men in students' rooms.
Ludwig has always loved to travel, and her work at the archives has taken her on many vicarious adventures. Some of Ludwig's most memorable collections include the papers of art professor Louise Jewett, who in her mid-20s set off alone to study art in Paris. "It was pretty gutsy back then for a young woman to go to Paris by herself and find a studio and a place to live," Ludwig said. "She was a charmer." Jewett, who taught at Mount Holyoke from 1901 till 1914, built the first house on what is now Jewett Lane. Unfortunately, soon after moving into her new house, explained Ludwig, she died of a heart attack while walking home in a blizzard from one of the residence halls, where she had eaten dinner with some students.
Charlotte Allen Ward, class of 1903, was another inveterate globetrotter. After graduating from Mount Holyoke, she married an Amherst College graduate and, according to Ludwig, "within minutes of her graduation was sailing away to Turkey with her husband, a medical missionary." ("In those days," she added, "they didn't know much of anything about who they were marrying!") The couple settled in a remote area of Turkey and eventually ended up at the medical school at the American University in Beirut. "They had six kids, and when World War I started, she fled back to the States with the small tots," Ludwig said. "Then when World War II came, she did the same thing." Ward continued to write vivid, detailed letters well into her 90s. "She voted for McGovern in 1972," said Ludwig, smiling proudly.
Caroline Boa Henderson, class of 1901, also made a profound impression on Ludwig. She graduated from Mount Holyoke and headed to the panhandle of Oklahoma where she married a farmer. "She had an incredible life. You can't imagine the conditions in which they lived," Ludwig said. "She was a farmer's wife, tending the animals and all the rest. They started out in a two-room house, and eventually added on to it. In one letter she talked about having snow up to the second floor. Her daughter wanted to go to medical school, so she left the farm and taught school for a year to raise money for her daughter's tuition. Things didn't go well for this family. It was a hard life out there." Henderson's letters were published in 2001 in a collection titled Letters from the Dust Bowl.
While some collections, like Henderson's, have been difficult for Ludwig because the lives they chronicled were so arduous, other collections have posed the more prosaic problem of illegibility. "Some letters are on extra-thin paper, and the ink has faded," said archives librarian Patricia Albright. To compound the problem, sometimes students saved paper by "cross-writing," a practice that was as obfuscating as it sounds: a page was filled with writing, then rotated 90 degrees and written on again. "It's terrible," Ludwig said.
Ludwig is a sleuth when it comes to deciphering illegible scrawls. "Reggie manages to read documents that I can't read at all," Albright said. "Sometimes a scholar will come in and ask for help reading a document. I always hope Reggie will show up to help out. She's our handwriting expert." With characteristic modesty, Ludwig explained, "I'm mostly guessing at what they wanted to say. It's not that I can always read it."
Ludwig's work has been of enormous help to the Archives and Special Collections. "Reggie's unique service is that she actually reads most of the letters and diaries in collections, which we never have time to do," Albright said. "Her summaries of the contents of these documents provide researchers with a much better idea of what's in collections. We also use her summaries to prepare more accurate online descriptions of materials. Without her assistance, our cataloguing records would be based on a less thorough overall review of the materials." When she started, relatively few of the collections had been read and summarized. Over the years, she has prepared summaries of the most significant collections of letters and journals and is working on newly received documents as they are donated. Her painstaking typewritten notes are contained in four large black binders. The archives has made some of her summaries available online and plans to digitize all of them.
In a tribute to Ludwig on the occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of her work in the archives, Anne C. Edmonds, College librarian emeritus, said: "With the experience of your undergraduate years, active involvement in alumnae affairs, and long tenure as a member of the College administration, you brought with you an intimate knowledge of the history of the institution and its operation. As director of admission your talent for reading dossiers, and selecting essential elements in them, was honed to a fine skill. So, who could have been better equipped to tackle the collections of personal papers that are part of the College Archives.… Your task has been more monumental than that of archives volunteer Mary Allen Edge '25, who washed, ironed, and arranged Mary Lyon's letters. She had only Miss Lyon's handwriting to read; you have had to decipher the writing of countless alumnae, alumnae relatives, and faculty members."
Albright, who has worked closely with Ludwig since joining the College in 1985, is equally impressed by her diligence, persistence, and enthusiasm. "As far as I am concerned, she is the most valuable treasure in Archives and Special Collections."
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Archives and Special Collections
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