George School Archives

Finding Treasures

Judith Sutton ’64 noticed a framed panoramic photo at a Brown Bros. auction a few years ago. Her curiosity piqued, she looked closer and discovered it was a panoramic photograph of George School students and faculty from the 1936-37 school year. 

“The serendipity was amazing,” enthuses Judith. “I found my mother’s oldest friend, Liz Hill Brady ’37, right in the middle, grinning in her sweater set and scarf. Searching for my mother, Ellen Pearson Sutton ‘38, I spied my uncle, Don Sutton ’39, son of Stan Sutton, coach, who with my father Stan Jr. ’36, (not in the picture) had grown up on campus. There was Rinky McCurdy Sutton ’40 who married Don, and there, tiny and uncharacteristically sober, was my mom. They called her Peanuts.” Judith had to have the picture even though it was wrinkled, badly framed, and water stained in one corner. She bid longer than expected and paid over fifty dollars plus tax and commission for the privilege of taking it home with her.

“It wasn’t just that it was a photo of my mother,” Judith explains. “The George School staff in the front row was a history of my own school years: Steve Fletcher ’28, my principle through all eight years of the newly formed Newtown Friends School, and his wife Wanda, who taught third grade. Jack Talbot, father of my lifelong friend Bill, a darling young Miss Dedinski, who tutored me in French at George School, Mr. Walton, whose face I’d known all my life from the Newtown Meeting facing bench, ‘Mr. Dick’ McFeely, my George School headmaster, and my grandfather, handsome as ever.”

Her mother was no longer living, so Judith shared the photograph with Liz who was overwhelmed with happy George School memories. She made a list of all the people in the photograph whose names she remembered and shared a scan of the photo with her friends.

Judith’s experience with this one discarded George School photograph was about to change her life. Her find led her back to George School to look through the school’s collection of all-school panoramic photographs in the archive. “I believe there is an image of the face of every single person who attended George School in the last one hundred thirteen years,” marvels Judith. “Imagine what could happen if we made them all safe and accessible. The archive could be full of such stories, if only we could find them.”

Judith discovered that the archives at George School were stored in a basement room of the Meetinghouse. Her concern about their accessibility, shared with members of the George School community,
prompted the formation of an archive committee and a commitment to house the George School archives in the new Molly Dodd Anderson Library.

“An archive is a cross between a library and a museum, and should be treated with the same respect,” explains Judith. “It is a collection of artifacts of all kinds, often irreplaceable and fragile, which tell the story of a particular institution. George School prides itself on its rich history. It should be a priority to make our archives safe and available to the public so that the George School story they document will be available into the future.”

“Plans now are in place to update the archives both physically and systemically,” shared Linda Heinemann, George School library director. “We are working on a mission statement, so George School knows what it is preserving, collecting, and acquiring, and on developing policies for conservation, preservation, maintenance, staffing, lending, copying, and emergency situations. A clean, properly ventilated, easily accessible space for the archives is an integral part of our new library.”

The vision is simple. The George School archives will be a contributing part of the school as a whole. They will have a prominent place in the new library, in a clean well-ordered room with glass doors that invite interest and curiosity. There will be enough space to house the archives and entire photography collection, now safely stored in another building.

Judith hopes that each student will be introduced to the archives and their contents. Encourages Judith, “I look forward to the day when we have a detailed, computerized catalog of the George School collections, so the contents can be known, and conveniently used by everyone.”

Help Save Our Past

We have launched a campaign to raise $250,000 to name the new archive for Kingdon Swayne ’37 in honor of his long and careful oversight of the collections. He has sorted, organized and described most of the items in both the photography storage room and the archives, and safely boxed and filed great numbers of them. Charlie Waugh ’36, a lifelong friend of Kingdon’s, has jump-started our fund-raising campaign with a matching gift pledge of $50,000, so we need to raise $200,000 from friends to meet the terms of the gift and the naming requirements for the library.

Please help us meet this challenge. Gifts can be made online or by email Director of Development Joanna K.C. Storrar or call 215.579.6569.