When the intrepid librarians ventured into the attic of the original building on campus, Hayfield House, this past summer to rescue and make sense of the campus’s history, they recovered A LOT of photographs. Great photographs, spanning the history of the campus from Coughlin High School down in Wilkes-Barre to the completion of the Academic Commons building on their current campus in Lehman, PA.
With old photographs we naturally lock on to the ones of the places we know, the locations we work in the walk through every day.
We wanted to share these photos. We approached Dr. David Chin of our English faculty and his English 50 Creative Writing class and proposed a contest to them. Choose from scanned copies of some of the photographs of the campus, and take “then and now” photographs with them. Use the new photos to write a poem about this experience. Simple enough. Seventeen students went out with photographs and captured the changes in the campus. Of those we choose three for having the best photos and poems.
Man with a thick beard
Is no longer in this room
He finished his work
– Curtis Evans
While we are an old institution, we are also very young. We have only resided in Lehman, PA for forty seven of our one hundred years. When we first moved here in 1968, the only buildings were Hayfield House, the old stone garage that housed the Conynghams’ nineteen cars, which many years later became the student center, and the beginnings of the construction of the classroom building which was later rechristened the “Murphy Center.” Hayfield was in those early years and up until the late 1980s THE building on campus. It housed the administration, the classrooms, the library, and faculty and staff offices. All of these except the administration have moved out of Hayfield. While some places on campus have changed dramatically, others have been left like time capsules, from when they were first used.
Challenge was what led Curtis Evans to this picture. The photo was in the “challenging” collection of photos we scanned for the students. These were photos of locations that were now offices which students would have to negotiate their way into, or locations like this one, that have become abandoned or where today’s students never go. Curtis had been in this room though, for an art project and recognized it when he saw the photo. After talking with a security guard and convincing him that the room he was looking for existed and was on the third, not the second floor of Hayfield, Curtis and the guard entered the room at the top of the house. Originally the rooms on this floor were the bedrooms for the male servants who worked for, or whose employers were visiting, the Conyngham family. When Penn State acquired the campus, these rooms became offices and small classrooms. At first glance Curtis and the guard thought they were in the wrong room, but Curtis entered, turned a corner and turned right into the spot where the man in the photograph had been sitting. Even the desk was still there. Triumphantly he took the picture.
The short humorous haiku he composed to the picture illustrated how close the past can feel when an area has remained untouched. It plays with time. The man has just barely left the room and, at the same time has not been in the room for over forty years. He finished the paper he was writing and is walking down stairs to turn it in or read the lecture typed on it and simultaneously has graduated or retired from teaching a long time ago and for all we know may be in the earth by now. Whereas the “Man with a thick beard” is done his work on campus, Curtis, a sophomore planning to major in mathematics or engineering still has a few more years to go.
