The Correspondence Series contains her first teaching recommendation letter in 1915, a teaching appointment notice, and a few personal letters ending in 1954.
Clara Wolverton’s “Grades Book” is a handwritten notebook documenting her teachers’ names and the grades she earned in each subject from Centennial Grammar School 1892 - 1894, Trenton High School 1894 - 1898, through New Jersey State Normal School 1898 - February 1901. There are some additional loose pages with calculations and class lists also housed with the book.
Wolverton, Clara, 1879-1964The Publications and Ephemera Series comprises materials specific to the Class of 1911 and Gamma Sigma Nu. The Class of 1911 materials include Normal School publications such as The Signal newspaper and The Seal yearbook, as well as ephemera related to Commencement and Class Day activities. The Gamma Sigma Nu materials include newsletters and reunion booklets. The date span is 1911-2000.
There are two scrapbooks in this series: The older scrapbook (c. 1873-1921) contains ephemera related to Commencement such as invitations, tickets, and programs for Senior class activities and the Commencement ceremony from the era of the Normal School.
In the 1908-1932 scrapbook, many of the Commencement programs only have the page with the events of the day and do not have the cover and/or a page listing the graduate’s names. Starting in 1918, some of them have the page with graduates’ names, but they were at one time pasted into a notebook that has since been disassembled but the back pages of the brochures may not be accessible and/or readable.
New Jersey State Normal School (Trenton, N.J.)Annual Reports of the State Normal School Board of Trustees to the State Senate and General Assembly provide a yearly review of both the Normal School and Model School operations. The information provided varies from year to year but generally includes a Report of the Principal [a position that became President of the College], Treasurer’s Reports, a list of officers and instructors, descriptions of courses of instruction and names of graduates.
New Jersey State Normal School (Trenton, N.J.)Her diary begins in 1913 with a daily account of camping in Shawmont, Pennsylvania (now Roxborough, Northwest Philadelphia), before going off to New Jersey State Normal School at Trenton where she then writes of her classroom and social activities to 1915.
Annual group portraits of graduating classes of the Model School. New Jersey State Normal School at Trenton students applied their newly learned teaching practices at the Model School. Many of the Model School graduates later attended the Normal School.
College of New Jersey (Ewing, N.J.)This series include tuition receipts for John McCormick (n.d., 1862) and George Hildebrecht (1902-1903); Commencement Programs (1878, 1880); the History of Class of 1904, compiled by Class President Kenneth H. Lanning (1930); Modellian (1915) [Model School yearbook]; and two scrapbooks kept by Grace Bromwell Fletcher, Class of 1907 and Emma R. Kerns Crofton, Class of 1916. These scrapbooks were pre-printed and titled The Girl Graduate: Her Own Book, providing places for photographs, event programs, class prophecies, class autographs and other ephemera.
This series features alumni-sponsored event programs dating from 1901 to 1991, and issues of the Accent and Alumni Review from 1987 to 1996. Although technically a publication of the college’s Office of College Relations, this publication does include class notes, news about local Alumni association chapters and feature articles on alumni. As noted above, information on alumni may also be found in issues of The Signal and State Signal (see Series 4).
Content warning: The materials include inaccurate, derogatory, and/or offensive depictions of people indigenous to the area and references to minstrel show performances.
The Annual Report began as a report submitted to the New Jersey State Legislature in 1855, and later to the New Jersey State Board of Education. The earliest issues contain essays and remarks by the school’s principals; descriptions of the Normal School and Model School curricula and courses; information about admissions standards; college finances; rules about student life and behavior; and lists of students, faculty and staff.
From 1855 to 1907, the publication was named Annual Report. Then from 1908-1933, it was named Annual Report and Catalogue (or Catalog). In 1930, separate Bulletins were issued for extension courses.Then, beginning in 1933-1934, the name of the publication changed to Bulletin and no longer contained “Annual Report” in its title. This new State Teachers College Bulletin was serialized to four issues per academic year: the first issue contained the first semester extension courses, the second was the main course catalog, the third published the second semester extension courses, and the fourth contained the summer school courses. This format was fairly consistent into the 1950s until the school published graduate bulletins later in the decade. In the 1960s, separate bulletins were published for field services and guides for applicants. In the 1970s, another issue was added for continuing education courses.
Of special note, the parameters of the academic year changed many times before settling on the current format of the school year beginning in autumn and finishing in the summer of the following year. For many issues of the Annual Report, the year began in what we would now consider the second or Spring semester. Often, the Bulletin contained the summer session in the year previous or following. During both world wars, issues had combined years likely to save paper. In more recent years, the Graduate Bulletin was issued with a different volume numbering system than the others in the series.
The content of the Annual Reports during the Normal school years contained a good deal of information about faculty updates, student life and activities, as well as photographs of buildings, classrooms, and groups of students. The Bulletins were structured more like a typical course catalog, but all graduates’ names continued to be printed until 1956.
New Jersey State Normal School (Trenton, N.J.)