Gold Star Men

The Gold Star Men collection was compiled to honor the Eastern men killed during World War II service. It consisted of three photo albums with photographs of each soldier and a card with information about his rank, hometown, attendance at Eastern and death. One volume was "Graduates and Faculty"; the other volumes were "Former Students Who Did Not Graduate".

The collection was just processed and digitized. The albums were disassembled and all photographs arranged in alphabetical order and sleeved with the card. The finding aid can be found here and the images can be seen on Flickr.

Campus Beautiful

The term "Campus Beautiful" has been used to describe the buildings and landscaping of Eastern as early as 1917.*

The Olmsted Brothers, famous for their work in the National Park System and other city parks throughout the country, planned the landscaping and placement of buildings from 1909 to 1959. A 1925 Olmsted drawing found in the archives shows the existing campus as well as plans for future buildings. The plan also included faculty and student gardens, an orchard and the university farm.

The Weber architectural firm developed a classical revival style for the campus buildings which was used until after World War II. The buildings Weber designed for Eastern include Roark, Sullivan, Cammack, Burnam, Fitzpatrick, Keen Johnson and the Miller, Beckham, McCreary Complex. Weber also did the design for the original library building completed in 1924.

The combination of the beautiful landscaping and architecture was impressive to students coming from rural Kentucky and the "Campus Beautiful" nickname that has survived to the present was created.

*Eastern Kentucky Review, Summer School for Teachers, 1917.

Austin 2009 Recap

Although it's been several weeks since attending the Society of American Archivists Conference in Austin, Texas, I still wanted to include some of the highlights. Below is information on Session 306.

Of all the programs I attended, the one on Omeka (Session 306) has excited me the most. A project of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, Omeka is "WordPress for exhibits." It appears to be a very easy way to publish professional-looking online displays of our collections without programing or html code knowledge. It's open source, and it uses Dublin Core metadata. With the ability to drag and drop items, such as images, into various display options and themes, this may be a viable solution for publicizing our materials. I love the idea of being able to include video clips and oral history interviews in our online displays, or to use zoomify for maps, as seen in the Lincoln at 200 web exhibits.

Serendipity

For several years I've had this negative on my desk. It was found in the EKU negatives, but I knew it wasn't taken on our campus. I also had no idea where it was taken and no idea what I was going to do with it.

Yesterday our student worker, Jessica, was entering metadata for university negatives in the collection and ran across this image. The building in the foreground reminded me of the above image, but a quick glance told me it wasn't the same, so I disregarded it.

We both recognized the Cincinnati skyline in the background, especially Carew Tower, and the bridges let us know it was taken from the Kentucky side of the river, so Jessica emailed a scan to the Kenton County Public Library. This morning we had a email from Tim with an identification.

The photo is taken from the Garden of Hope in Covington Kentucky. The Garden of Hope, briefly, is a life-sized recreation of various important places in the Holy Land (Christ’s tomb, Joseph’s carpenter’s shop, etc.). The structure in your photo is the chapel.

As soon as I read Carpenter's Shop I went back to my photo and looked again. Sure enough it matches. The signs on the prayer walk are identical in both photos. The Carpenter's Shop also has a plaque reading "In Eternal memory of Pete and S____ Schreiber." To learn more about the Garden of Hope read this news article from the Kentucky Post.

Search Pays Off

A search that began simply to identify the name of the person who had donated an 1862 wagon train diary turned up more than the name of the donor. We were able to identify the diarist through a little bit of sleuthing, and a lot of luck. To read more about this search, you should get hold of a copy of the upcoming issue of Heritage Highlights, the Madison County Historical Society's semi-annual publication. You can do this by joining the Society at http://madisonhistoryky.org
or by contacting them at info@madisonhistoryky.org

In this issue you find an article entitled "On the Trail of Mrs. Murison Dunn's Grandfather's Brother-in-Law." You can see by the title that the idea that we might track down the name of the diarist was highly improbable. We thought it was a fascinating story of how the diary came to the EKU Archives as well as the use of what are often thought of as genealogical resources to plug historical gaps.