For over 80 years, when the children who attended the campus elementary school visited the library, they worked with the college librarian. They read and were read to, learned how to find items using the catalog, and were allowed to check out books from a curated children’s collection. But in 1949, the Lida Lee Tall School
The tradition of inaugurating a new president is a fairly new one here at Towson University given our 150 year history. Part of that may be due to the fact that our first leaders were actually considered principals while the school itself was a teachers’ training school – something more akin to a vocational school.
To celebrate the inauguration of Kim Schatzel as Towson University’s 14th leader, we are looking back at the past leaders of the school. These essays are from a book we helped craft, Towson University: The First 150 Years. President Earle Taylor Hawkins was in office as Towson evolved from its exclusive focus on teacher
To celebrate the inauguration of Kim Schatzel as Towson University’s 14th leader, we are looking back at the past leaders of the school. These essays are from a book we helped craft, Towson University: The First 150 Years. Dr. Mary Theresa Wiedefeld’s rise to the position of president of the State Teachers College followed
Like several of her predecessors, Lida Lee Tall received much of her education and professional experience in Maryland. When appointed as principal in 1920, it was already clear that she was a woman of intelligence, vision, and commitment to teacher education who would move the Maryland State Normal School to a new level of
A couple years before Donald “Doc” Minnegan joined the faculty at the Maryland State Normal School [MSNS] at Towson, another Physical Education teacher was already in place. A young woman with dark hair and dimples, 20-year-old Mary Elizabeth Roach was often mistaken for another student. The students in 1926 referred to her as “Our Faculty
“The First Annual Faculty Follies will be presented on Tuesday evening”, announced the November 1941 issue of the Towerlight. Faculty members were to present a two-part program, the first of which was a kind of music hall performance with “all the members of the faculty who can be crowded on the stage”. “The second act,” the
It’s not unusual for many generations of the same family to be graduates of Towson. We meet students every semester who tell us that their great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents are alums. Often we’ll search for those alums in our yearbooks, newspapers, and commencement programs, and are rewarded with a result. What I find striking about
For about 50 years, Towson celebrated a now little-known anniversary, the very first day of classes at the Maryland State Normal School in January of 1866. The celebration, called Founders’ Day, is first in evidence in the school calendar for 1919/1920 when the Maryland State Normal School principal was Henry Skinner West. By that time,
As we celebrate the anniversaries of both the founding of Towson University in 1866, and its move to this campus in 1915, the Towson University Archives and Special Collections department is taking time to look back over the school’s history and some of the important but lesser-known people who have influenced it. In 1922 as