Who's Who in Cornish History

Research Days.

Blog notes on the progress of study on the history of Cornish.

Research Days

April 23, 2018

I'm in the process of logging copies I've made from the Seattle Public Library's Seattle Times archive. I've read over a piece from March 28, 1915 before, but in going over it again, some things have lept out. The article, only a few months after the school's founding, is titled "Musical Art Society Listens to Papers." Most of the article covers a talk Nellie Cornish gave the society called "“The Teacher’s Place in Education." The quotes are a great addition to and a clarification of things Nellie said that have come down to us. What stands out to me now, though, is how many thinkers on education were referenced in her talk. I remind myself that Nellie had little formal education, so the question of how deeply involved she was in the study of the writers she is quoted as having talked about. A listing, for further study:

Plato
Francis Bacon
John Milton
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi
Friedrich Froebel
Hugo Münsterberg

It is interesting that Nellie doesn't reference John Dewey, but does mention influences on him: Pestalozzi and Froebel. This is more interesting in that she may have been introduced to these thinkers by Calvin Cady, who was supposedly a disciple of Dewey. She quotes Münsterberg of Harvard in the article, who was Dewey's contemporary with similar interests in education and pychology, meaning she was tolerably up to date. She also makes no mention of Montessori, who she claims in M.A.N. was an influence on Evelyn Fletcher Copp, who taught her in Boston. But not mentioning someone who may have been of influence doesn't mean anything by itself, and for all we know she did mention people the journalist doesn't mention in his article.

January 19, 2018

The kind librarian at UW Special Collections tipped me off to a service of the Seattle Public Library: a nearly complete archive of The Seattle Times, beginning at the end of the 19th century. It's part of Newsbank which includes publications from all over the country, all indexed and searchable. I've been feasting on searches of "Cornish" and "Nellie Cornish." Really, really a great tool. All you need is an SPL library card; the number gets you in.

December 13, 2017

A January 1926 letter showed there was a move to rename Cornish in the memory of a Judge Burke. A letter from A.S. Kerry attempting to raise funds for the school revealed that the wives of prominent men in Seattle worked to keep the Cornish School afloat, but the men themselves were hoping it would fail. After a couple of eye-opening re-reads, I think Kerry was using some reverse psychology in a pretty desperate attempt to squeeze some bucks out of his peers in the business world, asking them to do it for the little woman. That doesn't change, however, the fact that these men must have despised Cornish for Kerry to have this avenue of argumentation open to him.

December 8, 2017

This was my first visit to UW Special Collections (UWSC) Library in about two years. The first time through the boxes of "The Cornish School of Allied Arts Records" was a quick sweep, just to take it all in. I and my research assistant, Leah Webster '16, mined a lot of gold, but in some ways it was random, relying on the low-hanging fruit. Going in on the eighth of December, I had more of a plan. A major issue, if not a pulse-raising one, is the status of ownership of the school as it formed and solidified. In 1924, after Cornish gave her school to the public and it was owned by a board, a relationship developed that would go on to almost destroy the Cornish School. I wanted to see the official papers that tracked the relationship.

I photographed hundreds of pages of legal papers and board minutes, which I'll be going over later. It seems clear that there are a lot of board minutes that are not in UWSC, key ones from the 1930s of what Nellie reports are some pretty hot exchanges. There are a lot of papers in the collection, and the minutes may turn up eventually, as I work through the boxes.

Another focus was to find and compare official histories of the school to glean an understanding the changes in how the school viewed itself over. In these, were some sit-up-straight shockers. First was a history paper by a UW student (I think) which I had only glanced at before. It became clear that what I thought I knew about Nellie Cornish's activities between 1900 and 1914 when she founded Cornish was woefully incomplete. These are the sorts of revelations historians fear: the box in someone's attic that upsets all your theories and narratives.