The “Registrar’s Office Scrapbook of Memorabilia 1906/1907-1918/1919 Volume I” contains official Phillips Academy documents of the time period. All the pages of the scrapbook are intact, and contents are arranged chronologically. The same forms and documents are present year after year. Among the materials are the honor list, the grading scale, the application of rooms form, schedule of recitation (three of them for every term of the year), Means Prize for original composition, grading card, Andover vs. Exeter annual debate, entrance exam forms and commencement week schedule.

Also included are some interesting facts about life at Phillips Academy during this period. The grading scale was different; 90-100 was A, 80-89 was B, 70-79 was C and so on. Also, students had to pay for rooms in the dorms, and entrance examinations were required in order to take classes. Students had to choose either a scientific or classical course of classes, and, on the basis of this, had different criteria to fulfill in order to graduate. Some of the brightest in their specific course gave a recitation at the end of the term about their findings during the preceding trimester. Other valuable records in the scrapbook comprise the first constitution of the student council and Principal Alfred E Stearns’s 1903 investiture speech. According to material in this scrapbook, the Phillips Academy football team played mostly college freshmen teams including Yale, Harvard and Penn, and the Andover baseball team played college teams. During Andover-Exeter, there was a dinner. There was also a Thanksgiving Dinner, which probably meant that students did not go back home during Thanksgiving. There was a train that ran every hour to Boston, and admission to the school’s Peabody Museum cost 75 cents. The student council raised more than $22,000 in a month to fund the construction of a new swimming pool in Borden Gym.

By Vabuk Pahari, Class of 2014

 

Scrapbook Box 6