Introduction

One of the collections housed in the Newcomb Archives is the collection of Newcomb College Student Records, dating from 1895-1925. As in all archival collections, this collection shows us the past -- glimpses of the dreams and hopes of generations to come before us. One way that this collection allows this sort of reflection is through its letterheads, the very stationery on which parents and their daughters wrote to the College. These colorful pages provide information about the family business or the employer, usually of the father- and by extension information about the whole of the commercial South. Fathers worked as jewelers, in the lumber industry, owned coffee companies, were cotton producers, were landowners, were liquor distributors, worked for railroad companies, were general merchants, owned car dealerships, dallied in import/export, and were trained as doctors. Each of these means of living had its own way of representing itself on paper through the art on the letterhead—a colorful picture of a coffee can, an engraving of a locomotive or the name of a company in large decorative script.

The letters expressed parental concerns for their daughters - financial questions, admission requests, explanations for sick students, or other expectations a parent from this time would have had. During this time period the College acted as the parent onsite, and certainly no daughter was considered a woman, capable of handling her own affairs.
Though not extremely wealthy, most Newcomb students came from professional or business-owning families. These families knew that their daughters could not rely on family wealth and that they must learn a skill to secure their livelihood or place themselves in a position to marry well. The letterheads show that Newcomb families were primarily from the South-Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. However, some young women traveled from New York, Indiana and as far as Mexico and Nicaragua to attend Newcomb.