The department is grateful to Morris Pierce, a longtime adjunct professor, for taking on the momentous task of compiling a history of the department. You can explore his history here and read on to learn more about his inspiration, his process, and a few stories he uncovered along the way.
Q: What inspired you to compile a history of the department?
A: Several events led to the decision to put together a history of the department and its faculty. I had recently completed a history of the University's campuses and buildings, and it was interesting to find that the chemistry department has compiled a good history of their faculty and PhDs over the years. Another factor was the large impact made by personalities such as Rush Rhees, George Eastman, and George Hoyt Whipple.
Closer to home, a portrait of Dexter Perkins dating to 1960 has been hanging outside the department office for time out of mind, and it is only identified by a brass plaque with his name. One of the library stories I ran across was him attempting to enter the recently opened book stacks in 1961, which required a university identification card to access. Perkins had retired in 1955 and had no identification with him, but he pointed to his portrait on the wall in the circulation room, which the student aide found acceptable. Perkins wrote a good autobiography, Yield of the Years, which was published in 1969 and provides a lot of history about the department and its faculty.
I have been a part of the department since 1988 in one capacity or another, and I have seen many faculty retire or move on to greener pastures. Unlike Perkins, none of them (as far as I know) wrote down any memories about their experiences. I had heard many stories about the faculty in the years before I arrived, but it was the retirement of Dick Kaeuper this past year that prompted me to start asking questions, starting with the simple one of where his offices had been. Thus I found out that the department had moved into the fourth and fifth floors of Rush Rhees fifty years ago in 1971. These were renumbered as the third and fourth floors in 1985.
All of these things, combined with a feeling that the history department really needs to know its own history, conspired to fire up my historical juices, so I starting digging through old University bulletins and newspapers to find what there was to find.
Q: What did you discover about the department’s history?
A: The first University of Rochester historian was William Carey Morey, who had entered the university in 1861 and after his freshman year had enlisted in the army as a private. Over the next three years, he rose to the rank of Brevet Lieutenant Colonel, having served with General Phil Sheridan in the Shenandoah Campaign and witnessing Lee's surrender at Appomattox in 1865. Morey then returned to Rochester and received his bachelor's degree in 1868 and a master's degree in 1871. Morey was appointed professor of Latin Languages and Literature in 1877 and Professor of History and Political Science when that department was formed in 1883.
Lawrence Packard was hired as the second history faculty member in 1913, and he became head of the department in 1920 after Morey's retirement. In 1915, Packard's former roommate Dexter Perkins joined the department. At the time, morning chapel was still mandatory and the entire faculty could fit comfortably in President Rush Rhees's office. Perkins married his wife, Wilma, in May 1918, just before Perkins was drafted into the army. Shortly after shipping off to France as a private in the infantry, he was commissioned and served with the army's historical section in Europe. After being discharged in the summer of 1919, he returned to his teaching duties and became head of the department in 1925 after Packard left.
Dick Kaeuper told me that he actually met Dexter Perkins, and they had met for a lunch in the Faculty Club that began and ended with a pitcher of martinis as Wilma summoned Dexter home. I also learned that Dexter and Wilma used to go on picnics in Highland Park with an ample supply of wine, and while they napped afterwards, their sons would go around and switch the labels on the various lilac bushes. Dexter's aunt, Fannie Merritt Farmer, wrote a cookbook in 1896 that became the Fannie Farmer Cookbook, and Wilma edited it for 45 years.
History became a full-fledged department in 1934, with Perkins as the first department chair. The College for Men had moved to the River Campus in 1930, and the faculty taught courses there and at the College for Women, which had remained on the Prince Street Campus. Tenure was granted to the faculty in 1936 after the retirement of Rush Rhees. The history faculty kept their offices in the old buildings on Prince Street until the two campuses were merged in 1955, the year that Perkins retired.
Q: How did you go about compiling your history?
A: Finding the rest of the faculty was fairly straightforward, as the University's annual bulletins included fairly complete lists. University Archivist Melissa Mead also shared a card file of the faculty that had been prepared in 1962 for Arthur May's History of the University of Rochester. Faculty members’ PhD dissertation institutions and years were also uncovered with only small amounts of painful digging, as were birth years for almost everyone and death years for those who have passed from this earth. Articles from campus and local newspapers were also helpful in tracking down some details.
The next challenge was to match some faces on the list of names. Annual student yearbooks often included group pictures of the faculty, which clearly revealed that the faculty was white and male until 1970, when social upheaval resulted in women and minorities being hired as tenure-track faculty. Faculty pictures largely disappeared from the yearbooks after 1984, although some individual faculty were highlighted in the early 1990s. A gap in faculty group photos from 1984 to 2009 can hopefully be bridged by alumni, who may be able to fill in some of the missing years.
Q: How would you like to expand your history?
A: One thing the department could do is to appoint one or more students to interview already retired faculty members (there are many around) and establish a formal program to interview future retirees. These interviews could then be written down and added to the department's historical record.
Future additions to the website may include stories about dancing around a maypole in Mendon Ponds Park, sightings of faculty in scandalous locations, and perhaps even some rumors of recreational drug use back in those wild days.
If you have any photos of the faculty or would like to submit additions or corrections, please send them to m.pierce@rochester.edu.