Category Archives: Williston Seminary

Williston’s First Orchestra

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Edward Payson Guild

Edward Payson Guild (b. 1857) graduated Williston Seminary in 1877.  He went on to a long career as an editor for Houghton Mifflin and contributed many articles, often on music, to a variety of magazines.  Guild wrote the following memoir for the 1914 senior class yearbook, The Log.

The Williston Musical Association had its birth in the Fall of 1876.  It was a natural crystalizing of musical interest which had been growing in the Seminary for some time.  In the previous winter there were several students more or less proficient in playing various instruments but their efforts at harmony had been confined to two or three fellows getting together occasionally and delighting themselves, if not their neighbors, with various instruments, playing college songs, hymns, or anything at hand.  The effect sometimes must have been lugubrious, as for instance one Sunday afternoon when I remember some combination of instruments wailing forth over the campus the strains of “Fading, still fading, the last beam is fading.”  No doubt more than one listener was anxious that the fading should be more expeditious.

One day came, however, when the boys said they would have a real orchestra, and in one of the early weeks of ’76 the first rehearsal took place.  The players were as follows: C. H. Lewis, E. H. Sleight, violins; H. S. Ballou, W. H. Harper, flutes; E. P. Guild, L. C. Parkhurst, clarinets; C. H. Norton, cornet; J. F. Woodhull, ‘cello; E. L. Ernhaut, pianist.

The original orchestra of 1876. Guild is in the back row, left. (Click images to enlarge.)

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Posted in: Alumni & Alumnae, Fine & Performing Arts, Memoirs, Student Life, Williston Seminary

The Center of All Days

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Williston Northampton’s Upper School hears an annual lecture on some aspect of school history.  The event is popularly known as the “button speech,” even though most years no mention is made of Samuel and Emily Williston’s button-derived philanthropy at all.  On January 30, 2013, Archivist Rick Teller ’70 spoke about diversity issues.

•      •      •      •

Good morning.  I’m here to talk about Diversity in Williston Northampton’s past.  How did we get to where we are?  Perhaps I should warn you: what you’re about to hear will not always be pretty.  History, including our own, shouldn’t come with perfume or blinders.

It is hard to pin down when Williston first enrolled students of color.  Student records simply no longer exist prior to the 1860’s.  But it appears that African American students first began to attend Williston sometime in the 1870s.  I can’t tell you who our earliest African American student was.  The first I can name is Robert Bradford Williams, who arrived in the fall of 1877 and graduated in 1881.  Williams was from Augusta, Georgia.  He was a protégé of Miss Lucy Laney, who ran an Augusta school for black children, and who worked tirelessly to find places in Northern schools for students of promise.  Miss Laney managed to get funding for Williams from the Reverend Joseph Twichell, a prominent Hartford clergyman and close friend of Mark Twain.

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Posted in: Northampton School for Girls, Williston Academy, Williston Northampton School, Williston Seminary

The Impossible Mr. Tibbets

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There was a time, only a generation or two back, when private schools were expected to have a few Great Eccentrics on their faculties.  In an era when people much more frequently kept the same job for a lifetime, and when residential faculty were discouraged from marrying, schools became, in a sense, havens for a few talented individuals who, for whatever reason, could not or would not easily thrive in outside society.  Williston Seminary was no exception.  Even so, for an unholy combination of inspired teaching and rampant misanthropy, one name stands out.

George Parsons Tibbets taught Mathematics at Williston Seminary from 1890-1926.  Over six feet tall, “a great body topped with a strong face and crowned with a flaming thatch of red hair,” he was “a marked man in any crowd.”  (Holyoke Transcript, April 7, 1926) And that was before one discovered that he had no talent for, or perhaps interest in, what most people considered normal social skills.  Even his best friend and faculty colleague of 36 years, Sidney Nelson Morse, noted – in Tibbets’ eulogy, no less — that he was “at times insistently importunate, imperious, and impertinent.”  “His attitude was a perpetual challenge to all whom he met.”  Tibbets tended to get straight to the point with what he called the “basal virtues” of his argument: “Conversation with him was seldom a smooth and halcyon sea of conventional phrases – there were wrinkles in it, made by the fusillade of his pelting comments.”  (S. N. Morse, Eulogy, corrected typescript and Williston Bulletin, November 1926.)

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Posted in: Faculty, Williston Seminary