Cartographic Portraits of Wellesley College

Written by Anne Kelly Knowles
Appeared in the November/December 2000 issue of "Mercator's World" magazine.

. . . continued from home page

Wellesley initially followed the model of the secluded female seminary that Mary Lyon had developed at Mount Holyoke Seminary, later Mount Holyoke College, in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Like Mount Holyoke and Vassar College, Wellesley first housed all faculty, students, classrooms, and administrative offices in a single building, called College Hall. This grand Second Empire structure loomed over Lake Waban in the southwest comer of the campus. The building's footprint appears on the 1894 U.S. Geological Survey quadrant for Framingham. Growth through the end of the nineteenth century produced a haphazard scattering of new buildings across the grounds, as well as student housing in the village of Wellesley. "The Vill," as it was known, figured prominently on a tum-of-the- century guide map for first-year students, most of whom lived off campus. Fire destroyed College Hall in 1914, clearing the way for a wholesale reconsideration of campus design. The trustees adopted a plan based on ideas Olmsted had proposed in 1902 - namely, leaving glacial features untouched, keeping wet, low- lying meadows free from development, and clustering buildings atop hills. In the wake of the fire, the college also adopted "Collegiate Gothic" as its predominant architectural style, first unveiled in the residential quadrangle built on the ashes of College Hall.

Although Olmsted, Boston's leading landscape architect, shaped the college's built environment, students made it their own. The most remarkable map in the Wellesley College Archives is a work by two members of the class of 1924, Alva Scott Mitchell and Elizabeth Paige May. Their Newe Mapp of Wellesley, published in 1926, captures the student experience in an era when the graduating class singled out its first wed ("class bride") and its first offspring ("class baby") for special honors. For those young women the campus harbored many courtship rituals, from testing a young man's intentions on Tupelo Point (if he kissed you three times at the Point, he'd marry you) to watching fellows dash for the last train back to Boston, meaning back to Harvard. "Only the fleet can date the fair, 11 a caption notes. Two students gazing at the Wellesley motto, Non ministraii sed ministrare, repeat the old joke on Wellesley women. "What does that Latin mean?" one asks. "That?" the other replies. "Not to be ministers but to be ministers' wives." (It actually translates as "Not to be ministered unto, but to minister.")

A Newe Mapp of Wellesley shows little academic activity, but it is full of tradition and fun. Class crews form a W on Lake Waban, oars raised in salute, part of the elaborate "Float"celebrations that marked the approach of commencement. Black-gowned graduates roll hoops down Severance Hill, an annual competition that persists to this day. Everywhere, students enjoy sports in the open air: diving, field hockey, tennis, archery, baseball, golf, horseback riding. On another part of the lake, a broad-shouldered student paddles confidently while her male companion wilts in exhaustion: "Thoughtless youth who asked crew captain to go canoeing." Vignettes around the edges of the map feature historic scenes and some of the college's founding women, adding a sober touch to this romp of a map.

The Newe Mapp sold very well, and no wonder. Its appealing blend of humor and style anticipated Alva Scott Mitchell's career as a pictorial mapmaker and Elizabeth Paige May's editorship of the Wellesley alumnae magazine. Their map was such a hit that it inspired Laura Scudder, a student at Mount Holyoke College, to map her college in similar style in 1928. Fifty-five years later Scudder persuaded Mount Holyoke to reprint and sell her map to raise funds for a scholarship program. It brought in a good deal less than the Wellesley map, due to the map's amateur quality and perhaps Mt. Holyoke's less wealthy alumnae.

Maps played a role in alumnae relations and fund raising at Wellesley College as well. On at least three occasions members of the college community used maps and the metaphor of mapping to assuage alumnae anxiety about change, to help returning alumnae orient themselves to an altered landscape, and to persuade them to invest in the future of their alma mater. Change comes hard to any college campus. New buildings and infrastructure cost money, but the financial burden is not the only problem. Students form intense attachments during their college years, to friends and to the places where they came of age. Old buildings house one's recollections of college life. Sitting on a familiar lake-side bench brings back a flood of memories. Like the landscapes of childhood, college campuses are potent with meaning. They cannot be altered lightly, particularly at private institutions such as Wellesley that rely more heavily than public colleges and universities upon the continuing support and involvement of their graduates.

The first instance of a Wellesley map serving alumnae relations came in 1929, when the former misses Scott and Paige offered their map for sale to alumnae returning to campus for a class reunion. A postcard advertising the map asked,

Two years later an official college leaflet promoting a book of "photographic displays" of new buildings included a map of the campus. The most significant new feature was the administrative and academic quadrangle atop Norumbega Hill, formerly the location of several cottage-style dormitories. "Do you know," the book's introduction asked breathlessly, "... that the Hen Coop [built hastily to house classes after the 1914 fire] is no more? And have you SEEN the million dollar Hetty H. R. Green Hall that has replaced it?"

Green Hall's massive tower gave the campus a new focal point and shifted the landscape's center of gravity to Norumbega Hill. According to Wellesley landscape historian Peter Fergusson, Green Hall was the college's most symbolic (and costly) building. A map produced by a local photography shop in 1942 distorted its size to gigantic proportions. The map also wrested buildings from their moorings and reduced the landscape to a tepid, featureless plane.

When I showed this map to Wellesley students recently, they howled with disapproval. "That's not our Wellesley! " one cried. The owner of the college's de facto bookstore, Hathaway House, may have felt the same. The following year Hathaway House published a gracious map in which groups of buildings nestle among the trees, accurately located in their true geographical positions.

T he college launched another major capital campaign in 1960. This effort contemplated a number of changes to the landscape, including expansions of the main library and the science building, as well as a new arts center that would eradicate the last, best-loved cottage on Norumbega Hill. The arts center facade was made of the same red brick as the academic quadrangle and the postfire dormitories, but its modem, low-slung rectangularity made it a striking departure from the college's dominant neo-gothic style. That disturbed alumnae, as did the later addition of a blocky art museum and cafe/theater complex.

As part of the fund-raising strategy to pay for these changes the college mounted a publicity campaign under the banner "How Do We Map the Future of Wellesley?" The 1962 brochure that asked this question of alumnae featured the first map of the Wellesley campus drawn by a professional cartographer. The text of the brochure proudly declared,

This is the map of Wellesley today - drawn by the expert cartographer Erwin Raisz.

Here you will find the "towers and woods and lake" - the old buildings you love - the new buildings you worked so hard to achieve - and the foundations of the faculty-alumnae center now under way.

All these landmarks are the outward and visible sign of Wellesley's rich heritage and her ever-new vitality.

The brochure then explained the urgent need for donations to meet the challenge of a matching grant from the Ford Foundation. "The ultimate goal," it concluded, "depends upon your lively and abiding interest to map the future."

Hungarian-bom cartographer Erwin Raisz (1893-1968) was best known for his exquisite landform maps and his system of physiographic representation (see "Plainly Visible Patterns," Mercator's World, September/October 1999). His commercial mapping business also produced campus maps for a number of New England colleges. Although his maps of Harvard, Radcliffe, and Williams College similarly take a bird's-eye view, however, the Wellesley map goes further in attempting to depict campus topography.

The result is mixed. Drumlin Hill looks like the track of a giant mole, and the jittery lines that suggest other hills do not convey their shape as well as the 1943 Hathaway House map does. Nevertheless, the hand lettering is beautiful, and Raisz brilliantly captured the signature profile of every major building.

The map is also quietly diplomatic. Raisz portrayed Wellesley's built landscape as more uniform and harmonious than it actually was. Jewett Arts Center, the new building located across Norumbega Hill from the gothic tower of Green Hall, looks unremarkable, its size diminished by the angle of the view. Although the funding campaign spoke the language of boosterism, it acknowledged the difficulty of accepting changes to the landscape, the very body of memory, in both its verbal message and the map's subdued cartography.

Wellesley maps produced for public consumption in the 1970s embodied the decade's bold cartographic style. They also reflected the college's increasingly outward focus, which included a new emphasis on research, competition with the nation's elite institutions for top-flight faculty, and a growing number of international students. Wellesley's proximity to Boston was now a selling point. The front cover of a 1971 visitor's brochure was emblazoned with a graphic map locating the college within easy reach of Logan Airport and the new hi-tech corridor of Route 128. A playful image in a 1979 brochure depicted the Wellesley student as a barefoot girl dangling her toes in the lake, surrounded by dense forest, while just behind her lay all the bustle of urban life.

Campus maps and views serve many purposes. They help administrators and trustees envision alternate futures. They orient new students and visitors. And they evoke memories. The last point came home powerfully to me when I spoke about campus maps at a 1999 Wellesley symposium called "Landscape, Meaning, Memory." Several alumnae told me after the talk that seeing their beloved place on maps helped them re-imagine themselves in the landscape. Others wished someone had made a map that captured the high jinks of their time at Wellesley. One member of the audience had graduated with Alva Scott and Elizabeth Paige in 1924. Where, she asked me urgently, was the map of class trees that I had mentioned in my lecture? She could not remember where her class had planted its tree, and she so wanted to see it again.

I wish I had studied the Newe Mapp more closely, for it answers another nostalgic question that arose during the symposium: Where was Christmas Tree Alley? This quiet, secluded lane, running between tall fir trees in the northeastern part of the campus, had long been a favorite refuge for Wellesley students. The trees had been ravaged by the mighty hurricane of 1938, and their replacements were damaged by another storm in 1956. New construction in the 1960s changed the remnant Alley beyond recognition. The Newe Mapp shows two rows of evergreens draped with red garlands and Christmas balls. "That lane was a magical place," one woman told me. "You can't replace a memory like that."

Anne Kelly Knowles is an Assistant Professor of Geography at Middlebury College.