Bonus: My favorite campus decoration this year was the tree in the Dean of Engineering’s suite. As I was walking past my eye was caught by the little owls with the letters on them. Stumped, I went in and asked about them. They’re the initials of the folks who work there.
Holiday Note: Mercifully, the library is closed from this afternoon until January 4th. I’m looking forward to using this break to think about something other than Rice. See y’all in January and Merry Christmas!
I got, somewhat unexpectedly, help from readers about the “old government trees” in Monday’s post. Loyal reader Mike Ross chimed in in the comments section and then I received a wonderful email from another Rice alumnus, this one with personal experience:
My name is Julian Ward (ChE1959). During my 40 years at B&R and associated companies I looked at many old Louisiana maps. My granddad was a surveyor in the early 1900’s for the timber industry in East Texas and Louisiana and I helped him find Government witness trees during summers as a teenager.
“Government trees in these old surveys are “witness trees” which the government surveyors used to mark section corners. The one mile square section contain 640 acres.
There were normally 4 trees near the section corner which were blazed with witness marks facing the corner monument. Before 1900 or so the corner monument could be a simple stake driven in the soil or a piece of stone if available. The surveyors also blazed the side of major trees along the section lines between corners. The size and type of tree were recorded in the survey notes. There was a federal fine for cutting a witness tree without replacing it with “permanent monument”.
I have personally seen copies of some old Louisiana Land and Exploration surveys and seen the same type of notes on the actual maps as you mention. These notes were transcribed from the surveyors field notes entered into a bound journal.
I hope this helps you with these maps.
It does indeed help and I am, as always, exceedingly grateful for the kindness that Mr. Ward and so many others of you have shown me. It is a daunting thing to so publicly display my weaknesses and ignorance and I don’t believe I could do it without the warmth and support of my readers. I can’t thank you enough.
Bonus: It happens that on my bookshelf there sits a copy of Robert Frost’s 1942 volume titled A Witness Tree. The first poem in it is “Beech,” a reminder of the markers and boundaries that exist whether we acknowledge them or not.
Where my imaginary line
Bends square in woods, an iron spine
And pile of real rocks have been founded.
And off this corner in the wild,
Where these are driven in and piled,
One tree, by being deeply wounded,
Has been impressed as Witness Tree
And made commit to memory
My proof of being not unbounded.
This truth’s established and borne out,
Though circumstanced with dark and doubt—
Though by a world of doubt surrounded.
An alert reader notes something that is, in retrospect, obvious:
I think “WRC” stands for “Will Rice College” instead of “Woodson Research Center”.
The former is very common acronym on campus.
Whereas, at the risk of being a bit blunt, it is probably true that only a relatively small number of people on campus likely have ever even heard of the latter.
I find this both completely hilarious and a perfect demonstration of why you always have to be suspicious in the archives. Especially of me!
Some days it’s like the stuff just drops into my hands.
This afternoon I was looking for something in a Will Rice scrapbook and when the cover fell open I discovered that it had been given to the Woodson Research Center at Christmas 1970 by their long serving (over 30 years) college coordinator, Babs Willis:
And a fine present it was, full of interesting photos and clippings, including the Will Rice College Christmas card from that year:
I also found a snapshot that I’d guess to be from the early ’80s that I think shows Babs herself. Is that her in the sunglasses at left?
Although I’ve long ago gotten used to crazy things turning up around campus, every so often even I get surprised. Last week I got an email from a very nice woman in Lovett Hall asking if I’d be interested in an old metal tube that had turned up. It was labeled “Rice Land Lumber Company – original tracings, permanent records. DO NOT DESTROY.”
Well, yes, I’d like to see that.
The tube was full of tightly rolled . . . something. The first things that came out were delicate tracings, so brittle as to be, in essence, dust held together by inertia.
Happily, though, once we got them out the other rolls turned out to be beautiful, intact linen copies, dated November, 1907:
Note, by the way, that these maps were made by Frank Shutts, who I talked about a couple years ago here. The very early date answers a question that I’ve sort of idly wondered about: Did President Lovett hire Elmer Shutts’s father or did he admit Frank Shutts’s son? It must have been the latter.
As you might suspect, it’s going to take a little time to get these properly unrolled but in the meantime I was fascinated by this:
There were long lists on each map, detailing section by section which trees were where–mostly pine but also a bit of sweetgum and holly. What I’m curious about is what “old government trees” might be.
Bonus:
After I took a second look at this picture in the Bud Morehouse papers I had quite a good laugh:
One of the (I’m sure many) differences between me and Professor Morehouse is that he spent his time on the permanent and I’m fascinated with the ephemeral.
The only sign I’ve seen attached to the front gate has been a “Closed” sign on the bars that they put up over Christmas break back in the day. I can’t even imagine not taking a picture of the rest of that off to the right.
Fifty years apart.
1965:
2015:
Bonus: A thoughtful alumnus sent us a box of student-made films from the late ’70s to early ’80s, for which we are very grateful. We’re pretty good with many formats but what on earth plays these??
What could provide these wonderful benefits??
Why, recreative activities of course!
Note that there was a short golf hole “adjacent to the field house.” I’ve peered pretty intently at some aerials from the 1930s and I can’t really see it–there are trees over there as well as the stadium so it’s hard to get a good look at anything. Here are a couple. Let me know if you can do better.
Bonus:
I saw something yesterday that I had seen many times before–a large stack of photographs taken by architecture professor Bud Morehead–and I realized with a start that part of their meaning had evaded me until just that moment.
He was looking at the shadows, not just the buildings, trying to capture their movement across the face of other buildings. You can see it best here (these photos were nowhere near each other in the stack, by the way):
Here’s another that I especially liked:
After a bit of thought I remembered a photo that I took in the winter of 2011. The winter light in the quad can be bewitching and hard to catch with a camera. I was pretty happy with this one although I never had any reason to use it. Now I do:
I got quite a few inquiries both in the comments and in my email from folks who were hoping that I could find a better image than the blurry one I put up last Friday.
Happily, in a separate envelope I found the nice, crisp negatives of the entire roll of film. First, here’s the same group up in the tree:
And here they are inside, sucking their thumbs (!)
No, really:
And as long as we’re at it, why not single someone out?
But the roll ended with some shots that are clearly a different event, although probably one that took place at roughly the some time:
If anyone can explain this (especially the thumb sucking part, which is just so, so unsettling), please let me know.
Bonus: Look at this!
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