PORTLAND, Maine — A cache of recently discovered teenage love notes scribbled on 150-year-old algebra and penmanship papers are giving historians a glimpse into the private lives of Maine high school students from a bygone age.
The hasty, pencil-scrawled missives, likely passed in class, hint at familiar school-age concerns of unrequited love, avoiding the teacher’s attention and who was hanging out with whom after class. At least one unrepeatable four letter word was also found, along with what is probably an unflattering cartoon drawing of a teacher.
In other words, while their communication methods may be different now, kids haven’t changed much since the 1870s.
The cast-off trove of ephemera was discovered during renovation work at the oldest building on the University of Southern Maine’s Gorham campus.
“This is the stuff that was never meant to survive,” said USM Historian Libby Bischof. “That’s the value of ephemera. This gets us close to the private lives of these students — and that’s hard to find.”
The notes were uncovered beneath the floor in USM’s Academy Building, built in 1806 as a private, college-preparatory high school for well-to-do families in the area. Stephen Longfellow, father of the famous poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, successfully petitioned the Massachusetts legislature for a land grant to fund the roughly 40-by-50-foot, two-story school building in 1803.
In its first year, 45 boys were admitted. The next year, 15 girls were also admitted, making it a rare example of co-education at the time, Bischof said. The building sheltered classes for the next 70-odd years, sometimes as a co-ed school and sometimes as a boys- or girls-only operation. It was called the Gorham Seminary for a few years.
The school closed for good in 1877 and was sold to the state for use by the teacher training college being built around it — which later morphed into USM — in 1878. It has been used for many years as a teaching space for USM’s art department.
The notes, doodles and academic papers seem to date from when the Academy was still a high school. They were found last year when historic preservation contractor Lee Hoagland was hired to repair the building’s grand, pillared portico.
Due to extensive rot and water damage, Hoagland removed the entire portico, exposing structural members holding up the building’s second floor. This opened up a long-closed gap between the two stories.
In that space, beneath the landing at the top of the stairs, Hoagland could see the pile of papers, just out of reach.
“I started fishing them out with my tape measure,” he said of his January 2023 find. “It was the coolest stuff.”
Later that August, Hoagland was able to fully access the space and retrieve the rest of the papers. It’s unclear how they got there, but he has two theories.
They may have been swept into the space, in one big pile, Hoagland reckons, during an 1870s-era renovation when the wide-plank floor was replaced with a more modern, thin-strip hardwood floor.
Hoagland’s second, more romantic idea is that they were slipped through the original wide-plank floor’s cracks, one-by-one over the years, by furtive students getting rid of incriminating or embarrassing evidence.
“I’m not 100 percent convinced either way,” Hoagland said.
One note, in particular, caught his eye, bearing a familiar four-letter word still not acceptable in polite company.
“We have this idea that we’re very different from people back then,” Hoagland said, “but maybe not.”
The two boxes of wrinkled, water-stained and dusty notes are now at USM’s archives on the Portland campus under the care of Coordinator of Special Collections Susie Bock.
There, Bock is delicately trying to uncrumple and flatten each piece without tearing or destroying them in the process. It’s slow-going.
“This is not a collection that I will have processed any time soon because I want to give the paper some time to relax and to straighten,” Bock said. “Right now, with any handling, little pieces are falling off.”
Eventually, the collection will be digitized and cataloged for future study by historians and students. For now, the fragmentary and often illegible scrawls are offering tantalizing details of young people’s lives in post-Civil War Maine.
“Ada, would’nt [sic] you like to swing after school,” one reads. “I will stop if you will. Will you? Write and say!”
A student named Belle Worcester is referenced in several notes.
“Bell [sic] Worcester is a [prissy or pretty] girl,” one states.
“We had a splendid time to [sic] last night, for Belle and I passed notes. We didn’t pass many though, for Mr. Lord was right behind us,” another relates.
One note fragment, still half buried in dust and dirt in a box Bock has yet to process, provides an enticing mystery to be solved.
“My darling,” it starts, before going on to include, “why did,” “could” and “Tuesday.”
Long division, algebra and English conjugation exercises are also abundant. Pages from Spencarian penmanship copy books were found, as well.
The Spencarian penmanship method was the standard taught in American schools from pre-Civil War years until it was replaced by typewriters in the 1920s, for business and personal communication. The elegant script can still be seen in the Ford automobile and Coca-Cola logos.
“I can’t wait to teach with these materials,” Bischof, who conducts classes in Maine history, said. “This is far from the typical documents that populate the archives.”
Bischof agrees with Hoagland that olden-days high schoolers are not so different from their modern counterparts.
“The past is not as distant as we think it is,” Bischof said. “I remember writing personal notes back and forth in my friend’s notebook when the teacher thought we were studying.”
The difference these days, Bischof said, is that students no longer write their secretive personal information down on paper, using digital means instead. That means fascinating, physical historic finds like this will no longer be possible in times to come.
“These days it’s all text and Snapchat,” Bischof said. “We’re not going to have this for future generations.”
