LEHMAN TWP. — A photographic history of Penn State Wilkes-Barre’s centennial is being compiled but needs community involvement to identify former students.
The idea for a traveling photo history developed when 40 boxes containing hundreds of pictures, thousands of slides, 30 scrapbooks and 20 years of yearbooks were recovered from the attic at Hayfield House, said Jennie Knies, head librarian at Penn State Wilkes-Barre.
The materials spanned Penn State Wilkes-Barre’s existence from classes held at Coughlin High School, the Guthrie School, both in Wilkes-Barre, to the move to Hayfield House in Lehman Township in the mid-1960s, Knies said.
Penn State Wilkes-Barre was the first institution for higher education in the Wyoming Valley. The satellite campus offered courses in engineering and other coal mining industry-related fields beginning in November 1916 at Coughlin High School.
Knies and Megan MacGregor, student engagement and outreach librarian at Penn State Wilkes-Barre, began to sort through the archives. They sent some of the collection to Penn State in State College to be digitized.
The women started to compile photos to make a calendar for Penn State Wilkes-Barre’s 100th-anniversary kickoff celebration slated for Nov. 5 at the F.M. Kirby Center For The Performing Arts on Public Square in Wilkes-Barre.
Photo history
Knies and MacGregor sorted the photos by decade but ran into a problem.
Many of the black and white photographs did not have names or dates, Knies said.
A unique solution presented itself to enlist help of the communities served by Penn State Wilkes-Barre to identify the faces in photos.
Knies, MacGregor and Rachel Rybicki, marketing and communications specialist at Penn State Wilkes-Barre, started the process to develop a traveling photographic history of the campus.
The project involves businesses and organizations to host an exhibit featuring laminated copies of pictures from the collection, Rybicki said.
“The public could write names (of students in the picture) right on the laminated photo,” MacGregor said.
Currently, the traveling photographic history is still being developed and is not ready to roll through area communities, Rybicki said.
“So far I only have one business willing to host the exhibit,” she said.
Area businesses interested in hosting the Penn State Wilkes-Barre’s historical photo display should contact Rybicki at 570-675-9269 or email her at [email protected].
Other images
The rest of the collection will be cataloged, then sent to Penn State Main Campus to be digitized and stored.
“Official archives are supposed to go to University Park,” Knies said.
Per Penn State’s policy, Penn State Wilkes-Barre yearbooks spanning 1956 to 1976 were sent to Penn State in State College to be digitally scanned, Knies said.
“They (the yearbooks) have been digitized and will be made available on Penn State’s website in the next week or two,” Knies said.
Knies and MacGregor are working to create a “fact checked” history of the campus. The completed timeline will provide a detailed account of Penn State Wilkes-Barre’s growth starting with the first classes held November 1916 at Coughlin High School.
“We have a basic history, but it has never been fact checked,” MacGregor said.
“Penn State Wilkes-Barre is the second oldest (Penn State) satellite campus, I believe,” Knies said. “The oldest possibly being (Penn State) Mont Alto campus.”
