One of the trivial things that has long bothered me is the fact that I can see all those framed documents hanging on the wall of the old faculty chamber but I can’t tell what they are:

(This picture was taken at the 25th reunion of the class of 1916, by the way. On the platform, left to right, are Samuel McCann, Harry Weiser, H.A. Wilson, Dr. Lovett, Radoslav Tsanoff, William Ward Watkin, and Claude Heaps. It’s harder to identify the alumni because of the way they’re turned towards the speaker but in the top two rows of the men I can spot Ed Dupree, Carl Knapp, William Nathan, and Tiny Kalb. The women are impossible–those hats!)

Here they are again in an empty chamber, along with those incredible light fixtures:

Anyway, while looking for something in the 1936 Threshers (I can no longer even imagine what it was) I found the answer, which turns out to be exactly what you would suspect if you thought about it at all:

I’m not on campus today so I can’t check but I’m relatively certain that all (or at least most) of these parchments survive.

Bonus: A sharp-eyed reader sent this today. I have no idea what it means.