Smith Quarterly

In this special issue, we’re highlighting 12 iconic creative works by Smithies. For more Smithie favorites, check out the full list.

Have you written a book? Made a movie? Created a fashion line? Or had a hand in another creative pursuit? Submit your project to be considered in a future Favorites column!

The Smith College Archives houses more than 350 scrapbooks created by undergraduates between 1881 and the early 2000s. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, scrapbooks were a popular way for students to preserve mementos of their time at Smith. One of the more robust examples in Special Collections was assembled by Fronia Ernestine Fisher 1913 of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Fisher’s scrapbook is loaded with keepsakes, including calling cards from various young gentlemen (Horace E. Frost’s card appears twice) and red-and-white paper flowers—decorations from a Smith dance that students tore down at evening’s end to take home as souvenirs.

These two pages document Fisher’s role in the sophomore class production of Rudens by the Roman playwright Plautus, performed at Smith on February 4, 1911. Believed to have been written in the second century B.C., the comedy is known in English as The Shipwreck or The Fisherman’s Rope. It tells the story of Palaestra, a girl kidnapped by pirates who is ultimately reunited with her father thanks to the unscrupulous slave dealer Labrax. By Cheryl Dellecese

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