Established in 1908 as a two-year Normal School in response to the growing demand for professionally trained teachers, the New Jersey State Normal School at Montclair became Montclair State Teachers College in 1927.
Iona Jean was born on September 18, 1914 to Howard A. (1875-1966) and Dolina MacKay Fackler (1874-1948). Iona graduated from the New Jersey State Teachers College and State Normal School at Trenton in 1937. She received her Master’s from the Teachers College at Columbia University in 1941. During World War II, she volunteered for service on June 29th, 1943. She entered as an Ensign and was later promoted to Lieutenant and finally Lt. Colonel in the U.S. Navy, where she met Ensign (later Lieutenant) William Creed Myers (1916-2009). Iona and Creed married in December 1945 in the Lawrenceville Presbyterian Church. They had four children: Howard Carl, Dolina Jean, Hellen “Holly” Holland, and Frances Fackler.
Soon after graduating from the State Teachers College, Iona joined the Alumni Association and began her long board membership starting in May of 1938. She gained a paid position as Executive Secretary with the Association in June of 1939. In 1941, she lived on campus in Ely House and later, Allen House as Resident Advisor. In 1943, she asked for leave of absence for the duration of the war and six months thereafter to join the U.S. Naval Reserve, WAVES. In 1946, she formally resigned as Executive Secretary of the Alumni Association.
She was the 14th Life Member of the Alumni Association, having received the title in 1955. That year, she returned to the board after leaving for 9 years to raise her children. Through the years, Iona served on every committee the board has had through 1989, but the most important to her were the Investment Committee, then Annual Giving, and finally, the Alumni Scholars. She never served as an officer on the board because chose to serve as an officer in other local groups which took more of her time. In total, she served the Alumni Association for 41 years.
Elizabeth Bodine (1880-1964), was a graduate of the Model School Class of 1898 and Bryn Mawr College. She taught at Trenton Junior High School No. 3 and was an English teacher at Trenton High School. After retiring from teaching, she became a librarian at Trenton Public Library. She was a founding member and honoree of the Trenton College Club (which later became a branch of the American Association of University Women) and served in a variety of civic, cultural, and historical organizations around Trenton. She lived with Gertrude Scudder Bodine and her brother Joseph Bodine throughout their marriage, and then moved with Gertrude to Morrisville, Pennsylvania after Joseph’s death in 1950. Elizabeth died on January 14, 1964.
Charles Warren Brewster was born in 1871 and was the brother of Alice Langdon Brewster and Edith Brewster. He worked as a banker in New Hampshire. He married Martha “Daisy” Tredick Brewster (1879-1958) and had a son, Charles T. Brewster. He died in 1950.
Edith Gilman Brewster was born in 1873. Her brother was Charles Warren Brewster and her sister was Alice Langdon Brewster. She worked as a kindergarten teacher and social worker in New Hampshire. She died in 1960.
Gertrude Scudder Bodine (1894-1978) was a graduate of Model School class of 1911. She was born at the “Cherry Grove” estate in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, the only child to the later in life marriage of Joseph Rue Scudder (1851-1895), and Gertrude Mae McCully (1860-1944), an organist and librarian at Princeton University. After graduating from the Model School, she attended Mount Holyoke College and graduated in 1915. She taught English and Latin in Junior High School No. 1 in Trenton. In 1918, she married Joseph Lamb Bodine (1883-1950), who also attended the Model School a decade earlier. Joseph Bodine served as U.S. District Attorney for New Jersey, Judge of the U.S. District Court for New Jersey, Associate Justice of the New Jersey State Supreme Court, and later Superior Court Judge. They had one son, John W. Bodine.
After her marriage, Gertrude served extensively as a volunteer in civic, cultural, and historical organizations in the Trenton area. She served on the board and later as president of the historic William Trent House museum for 35 years. She was also very active in, and served several years as president of, the Junior League of Trenton, First Presbyterian Church of Trenton, and the Trenton YWCA.
Alice Langdon Brewster was born January 25, 1868 to Charles Gilman Brewster (1832-1880), a taxidermist and proprietor of a natural history store in Boston, and Mary Ann Hill (1840-1924), in Roxbury, Massachusetts. After Charles’ death in the shipwreck of the steamboat S.S. Narragansett in 1880, the family joined his sister’s family in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Alice attended high school in Portsmouth and later graduated from Wellesley College in 1889. After teaching at Westbury High School in Massachusetts for two years, she moved to Trenton to teach literature and history at the Model School of the New Jersey State Normal School where she served from 1891 to 1917. She was well-liked by her students and maintained decades long friendships with several of them. After the Model School closed in 1917, Brewster taught English at the New Jersey State Normal School in Trenton until her retirement in 1933. Shortly after, the Brewster House dormitory was opened on the new Hillwood Lakes campus. It was the first campus building named for a living person.
After her retirement, Brewster returned to her family home in Portsmouth, where she lived with her sister Edith Gilman Brewster (1873-1960), brother Charles Warren Brewster (1871-1950), sister-in-law (Charles’ wife) Martha “Daisy” Tredick Brewster (1879-1958), and “Black Velvet” the cat. The Brewster family also had a cottage in the White Mountains in North Woodstock, New Hampshire where they would spend a few weeks in the summers.
Alice Brewster was an active writer and self-published several small poetry books. She operated an antiques shop in the home and traveled around New England as a dealer and buyer at antiques fairs and shows. After her sister Edith Brewster died in 1960, she moved to the home of her nephew Charles T. Brewster in Meredith, New Hampshire. She died February 14, 1962 in New Hampshire.
Martha “Daisy” Tredick Brewster (1879-1958), was married to Warren Brewster (1871-1950). They had a son, Charles T. Brewster. Later in life Martha lived with her sisters-in-law Edith and Alice Brewster in New Hampshire.
The New Jersey State Normal School at Montclair was established in 1908, approximately 5 years after the initial planning of the school. Charles Sumner Chapin served as the first principal. The first building constructed was College Hall, and it still stands today. At the time, the campus was around 25 acres (100,000 m2), had 8 faculty members and 187 students. The first graduating class, which numbered at 45 students, contained William O. Trapp, who would then go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1929. The first dormitory was built five years later, in 1915, and is known as Russ Hall.
In 1924, Harry Sprague was the first president of Montclair, and shortly afterwards the school began being more inclusive of extracurricular activities such as athletics. In 1927, however, after studies had emerged concerning the number of high school teachers in the state of New Jersey (only 10% of all high school teachers received their degrees from New Jersey), the institution became Montclair State Teachers College and developed a four-year (Bachelor of Arts) program in pedagogy, becoming the first US institute to do so. In 1937 it became the first teachers college accredited by the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools.
In 1958 the school merged with the Panzer College of Physical Education and Hygiene to become Montclair State College. The school became a comprehensive multi-purpose institution in 1966. The Board of Higher Education designated the school a teaching university on April 27, 1994, and in the same year the school became Montclair State University. It has offered Master of Arts programs since 1932, Master of Business Administration since 1981, Master of Education since 1985, Master of Science since 1992, Master of Fine Arts since 1998, Doctor of Education since 1999, and Doctor of Environmental Management in 2003 (now the PhD in Environmental Science and Management). PhD degrees were added in Teacher Education and Teacher Development in 2008, Counselor Education, Family Studies, Mathematics Education, Communications Sciences and Disorders by 2014, and most recently Clinical as well as Industrial/Organizational Psychology (2021). In 2018, Montclair State University graduated more than 30 doctoral students.
Principal of New Jersey State Normal School from 1855 to 1864.
