RAMble, the University Libraries' blog

The Overlease Collection consists of the papers of William Roy Overlease (1925-2007), who was a professor at West Chester from 1963 to 1986. It contains a considerable amount of information on the history and development of the Darlington Herbarium, a gift to West Chester from the Chester County Cabinet of Natural Science in the 1870s. To the left you can see the Cabinet's catalog of their plant specimens, dated 1834. There are also documents Overlease created to help navigate the Herbarium. There is biographical information about William Darlington (1782-1863), prominent botanist, founding member of the Cabinet, and author of Flora Cestrica, a listing of plants found in Chester County – originally published in 1837 and updated in 1853. Below, you can see both editions. 

Overlease and his wife Edith pursued many research projects together, both in the West Chester area and elsewhere, and the collection contains raw data and drafts for scholarly publications from these projects. There is correspondence and other material relating to the fight for the Gordon Natural Area, and materials relating to courses that Overlease taught at West Chester. Additionally, it contains biographical information about Overlease.

William Roy Overlease was a botanist, ornithologist, ecologist, historian, and teacher who was committed to science education throughout his career. Among many other accomplishments, he was in large part responsible for the establishment of the Robert B. Gordon Natural Area for Environmental Studies on West Chester’s South Campus, and he was Curator of the Darlington Herbarium and the College Science Museum.

Overlease was born and grew up in Elkhart, Indiana. He attended Michigan State University, where he earned a Bachelor of Science in Forestry, a five year professional degree, in 1950, and an MS in Conservation in 1952. These were early days for academic programs in this field, and Overlease was required to get special permission from the graduate council of the university in order to pursue his MS. He also earned a Secondary Education Teaching Certificate in 1950, demonstrating his dedication to science education from the start of his career.

From 1952 to 1957, Overlease worked for the Interpretative Program of the Indiana Department of Conservation, Division of State Parks, as the only full-time state park naturalist in the Midwest (the rest were hired seasonally or on a part-time basis on weekends). As such, he had broad responsibilities for developing educational programming for state parks throughout Indiana.

During this time, he met Edith Dymond at Turkey Run State Park, Indiana and they married there in 1955. They were a devoted couple and collaborated on all of William’s field work and publications.

Overlease returned to Michigan State University, to pursue a PhD in Botany and Plant Pathology, which he completed in 1964.

In 1963, he began working at West Chester, becoming a full professor in 1967. Some of the courses he taught were Ecology, Plant Taxonomy, Field Botany, Human Ecology, World Ecosystems, and undergraduate and graduate seminars, as well as summer mini-courses. To the right, you can see a note which Bonnie Lauer, a former student, sent to Overlease years after she graduated, expressing her gratitude. 

One of his greatest accomplishments was to establish the Gordon Natural Area at the South Campus as a permanent natural laboratory to study plants and animals. The struggle began the year after he began working at West Chester, when he found out that the Physical Education Department wanted to develop 45 acres of forest on the South Campus: “Beginning in 1964, I began to request and negotiate with the Physical Education Department to preserve some of the forest and wild land owned by the college on South Campus for ecological studies. After several years of effort, a hearing was obtained with the board of trustees but the project was turned down. With the change in national attitude toward ecology in the early 1970s a new effort was made.” The second time the proposal went before the board of trustees, it was approved and on November 10, 1973, the Robert B. Gordon Natural Area for Environmental Studies was dedicated.

Overlease’s curation of the Darlington Herbarium was another important contribution to West Chester. The Herbarium originally belonged to the Chester County Cabinet of Natural Science, but when its membership dwindled in the later nineteenth century, the Cabinet donated all of its 17,000 plant specimens to West Chester. The specimens were mostly collected between 1828 and 1850, from all over the world: throughout North America, Siberia, South Africa, Australia, Jamaica, the British Isles, the European Continent, and Egypt are all represented.

Over the years, various faculty members and students from the Science Department had ensured the preservation and organization of the specimens. In 1965, Overlease overhauled the cataloging system, rearranging the collection alphabetically by family and alphabetically be genus within each family. A card catalog reflecting this new organization system was created over five years. Overlease also replaced the wooden cabinets the specimens had been stored in for decades with metal cabinets that offered the specimens much more protection. 

References

Holt, Jack. 2011. “William R. Overlease (1925-2007).” Bartonia 65: 115-116.

http://digitalcommons.wcupa.edu/gna_sp_series/10/ Accessed May 24, 2017.

Gordon, Robert B. “The William Darlington Herbarium of the West Chester State College.” [circa 1950s].

Overlease Collection, Box 1, Folder 2.

Overlease, William R. “A Short History of the William Darlington Herbarium.” 1989. Folder 1, Box 1,

Overlease. Special Collections, West Chester University Libraries.

Overlease, William R. [Curriculum Vitae]. [Circa 1983]. “Personal Data” folder, Overleaseb Collection.

Special Collections, West Chester University Libraries. 

For Museum Day, I decided to research Special Collection's Museum Collection. This collection includes many archeological artifacts, but we have little or no information on where they were collected, by whom, or under what circumstances.

The original core of the collection was from the Chester County Cabinet of the Natural Sciences, Chester County’s first natural sciences museum. So I started with what material we have about the Cabinet. However, I discovered that its contents only pertain to the herbariums and botanical specimens contributed to the Cabinet, rather than artifacts I'm researching.

Then I went to the student newspapers. Full-text searching the student newspapers is often a great way to pinpoint relevant information. In this case, unfortunately, the papers reported on so many student trips to other museums that I couldn’t pick out information about West Chester’s own museum.

In the course catalogs, I began finding scraps of information. Starting in 1879-1880, the museum collection was located in the Main Building in an addition that had been built in 1878-1879. When the Old Library was built in 1902, the collection was moved to its second floor. The mineral collection of the late Alfred Sharples was donated by his son F. F. Sharples in 1904-1905, and it seems that J. Preston Thomas’s collection of animal heads, horn, and Native American artifacts was made in 1906-1907. In 1909-910, over fifty Roman and Etruscan ceramic artifacts were donated by Dr. Edwin Barber, Director of the Pennsylvania Museum, and a collection of taxidermy birds and bird eggs, made by the late Frank Darlington, was added in 1915.

It seems that the attention and care given to the museum may have waned in the late 1920s. The museum was always given a paragraph description the course catalog up until 1927-1928, and in 1938-1939, it stops being mentioned at all. What does this mean? In 1939, the Old Library was renovated and perhaps the perennial problem of space in libraries led to the relocation or dissolution of the museum. Or maybe the staff responsible for the course catalog just decided not to devote space to the museum anymore. It’s hard to tell if the change in the course catalog provides anything meaningful.

We have an inventory of the museum collection from 1946. Esther Wolfe, who was probably a West Chester student, created an “Accession List of Recataloged Items” which consists of an inventory of a large number of Native American artifacts, as well as European Neolithic artifacts, some ancient Greek pottery, and random items ranging from a Turkish comb to Chilean spurs. In total, there are 684 items listed, according to the count at the end of the accession list. An inventory of the museum collection completed in 2012, however, consists of about 300 items. Wolfe notes at the end of the accession list that there is a card catalog for the collection “in Museum,” an indexed clipping file, and a collection of school loan articles filed in “old Herbarium Cabinets,” and that she also created a report in 1946. There is also a bibliography of books and museums consulted in doing all this work. Clearly, at some point we lost track of both records and artifacts.

Occasionally archival research yields useful information easily and quickly, but very often it doesn’t. I still don’t have any idea where I might find the provenance information I’m looking for, or a full picture of the history of the Museum Collection. Sometimes archival research is like that. 

Images: 

Top right image: Artifact to the left has a label reading "Pottery from Cliff dwelling ruins - 1000-2000 years before Spanish came" (Museum Collection, Box 1, 45-109). Artifact to the right has a label reading "Ancient Pueblo Pitcher 11-1200 A.D." (Museum Collection, Box 1, 45-129). Artifact in the middle is listed in the inventory as "ancient pueblo kettle with incised design" (Museum Collection, Box 1, 45-128). 

Middle image: Artifact to the left has a label reading "2 Handled Cup Greek 5th-4th cent. B.C." (Museum Collection, Box 8, container 3). Artifact to the right has a label reading "Etruscan Buchero Ware 5th-3rd cent. B.C." (Museum Collection, Box 8, container 3). 

Bottom image: Artifact to the left has a label reading "Cochiti Storage Bowl - Note design for four points of world, 1891" (Museum Collection Box 3, not listed in inventory.) 

References

Sturzebecker, Russell L. The Centennial History of West Chester State College. West Chester: Tinicum Press, 1971. 

West Chester University Course Catalog 1879-1880, pg 21. 

West Chester University Course Catalog 1904-1906, pg 41. 

West Chester University Course Catalog 1906-1907, pg 39. 

West Chester Course Catalog 1909-1910, pg 36-39. 

West Chester Course Catalog 1916-1917, pg 44. 

Wolfe, Esther. "Accession List of Recataloged Items." 

The first commencement ceremony at West Chester State Normal School took place on June 25, 1874, in Old Main Auditorium.  According to The Centennial History of West Chester State College by Russell L. Sturzebecker, the 1874 program listed ten students as graduates:  one man and nine women.

The oldest commencement program housed in West Chester University Library’s Special Collections is from 1875.  

Special Collections has a number of interesting photographs from commencements of years past.  The photograph to the right is of the commencement activities from the summer of 1944.  The photo appears to have been taken from one of the upper floors of Philips Memorial Building.  Note the Quad area, including Old Main Hall, and the Old Gymnasium.  Also note:  most, if not all the graduates in their caps and gowns are female due to World War II.

Over the years, Commencement Speakers have included locally, regionally, and nationally recognized educational leaders.  They have also included government leaders including four governors of Pennsylvania (last one being William Scranton in 1965), and one future president (Gerald Ford in 1971).   

Medical expert and television personality Dr. Mehmet Oz  was the Keynote Speaker in 2011.

Distinguished alumni have also been commencement speakers.  Michael Brune, Class of 1993, Executive Director of The Sierra Club, was the Keynote Speaker in 2012.

On May 13^th – May 14^th 2017, over 2,500 students -  including undergraduate and graduate students - are expected to graduate from West Chester University.  Will you be one of them?   

Blog post written by Neal Kenney, Library Assistant for Interlibrary Loan and Special Collections.

“The Art of War: The Rhetoric of Propaganda Posters during World War II” is the title of a new exhibit now on display at F.H.G. Library. Located on the 6^th floor by Special Collections, the exhibit examines the presence and purpose of rhetorical features in World War II propaganda posters.

Created after the declaration of war on the Empire of Japan, the Office of War Information was established by the US government with the purpose of regulating the content and imagery of war messages directed to pub

lic, particularly the production of war propaganda posters. These posters dealt with a variety of themes such as the need to work, the nature of the enemy, and the need to sacrifice. Rhetorically manipulating the viewer through an plea to a distinctly American appeal to pathos and emphasizing the personal agency of a single individual within a worldwide conflict. These posters proved valuable in cultivating patriotic moral. 

On display are a variety of posters reflecting the various themes and rhetorical approaches used to advertise war bonds to the public and promote a work ethic beneficial to the war effort. Visit the exhibit to learn exactly how art was weaponized and used to fight on the Home Front during the Second World War.

The exhibit is open during normal library hours.

The exhibit was created and the blog post was written by Chadd Heller, English Major and Class of 2017.