Taking a look at some of the college’s unique (and sometimes perplexing) objects in our Special Collections
By Robyn Rime
The Special Collections in Fraser Hall Library range from college memorabilia to local historical documents to rare, fragile, and valuable artifacts. It’s easy to see why some of the items ended up at the College. Faculty publications, decades of old yearbooks and campus newspapers, and posters from SUNY Geneseo events in years past all populate the College Archives. Papers and photos from the Genesee Valley and its first settlers, the Wadsworth family, span more than 150 years of the region’s history. But other items are puzzling, their provenance less directly tied to the College. Why, for instance, does the library own a collection of turn-of-the-century luggage tags? In this ongoing feature, Scene will highlight some of the unusual, intriguing, and often unique objects in Geneseo’s Special Collections.
Graduation Dress, 1903
When Jessie J. McNall graduated from the Geneseo Normal School in the Class of 1903, she wore this dress for the occasion. Created in Scottsville, NY, it is made of white lawn, a traditional fabric for women’s commencement dresses in the early 1900s, and it’s delicately adorned with shirring, lace medallion inserts, and a wide satin sash. To modern eyes, it appears very small. Edwardian fashion still dictated tightly corseted silhouettes, and the dress is evidence of the wearer’s tiny waist. Like many special occasion dresses of its time, this originally had a train. When McNall donated the garment to Geneseo, she noted she had later altered it into its present form.
When McNall attended Geneseo, applicants to the Normal School didn’t need a high school diploma—anyone who wanted to teach could enter. McNall graduated from the Classical Course, a more rigorous four-year (instead of two-year) program that required an academic course along with its teacher training. Nearly all the graduates at that time went into teaching, and McNall was no exception. As a professor of science at SUNY Potsdam, she went on to serve as science department chair for many years and established an endowed fund to award sophomores for excellence in science, especially if preparing for teaching. She retired in 1946, and the McNall Science Center on the SUNY Potsdam campus is named in her honor.
