Alice Gertrude Kendall

Alice Kendall

In the 1913-1914 academic year Miss Alice Gertrude Kendall of Andover, Massachusetts, served on the faculty of Wilson College as a substitute librarian as the regular librarian had taken a leave of absence.  Twenty-four years old when she applied, she had earned her B.S. in 1910 from Simmons College.  Following her graduation, she worked in the Yale University Library in 1910-1911, the Harvard University Library in 1909 and 1911, the Boston Athenaeum in 1912-1913, and for four months in 1913 as acting editor of the Library Journal.  After having been hired at Wilson at a salary of $400.00, never having been south of New York City, she was understandingly curious about the college, the surrounding area, and her library responsibilities. Therefore, she asked Dr. McKeag to send her a catalogue. She wrote that any information would “enable me to console my family, to some degree, since they feel that Chambersburg is in a far country and an unknown one.”  In response to her queries, Dr. McKeag sent her not only a catalogue but also a “book of views” and explained that the library would be open from eight in the morning until nine in the evening every day except Sunday when it would be closed and that three student assistants each worked ten hours each week in the library so that the assistants would care for the library thirty hours each week. After she had received it, in her note  of appreciation, she said that she was eager to begin her new work and would take Dr. McKeag’s suggestion that she arrive on September 15 and, therefore, on Monday, September 15, 1913, she left New York City on the 2:04 train and arrived in Chambersburg that evening at 9:07 and began her work the next morning.

The Wilson correspondence includes little about Miss Kendall’s life at Wilson.  In one letter Dr. McKeag asked her to order for the library the five volumes of Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible that Miss Parker, who taught Bible, needed for her classes, although that expenditure had not been in the budget. In addition, upon one occasion Miss Kendall was concerned and reported the fact that, when she and another faculty member had been walking between Fletcher and Main, they saw through a library window a student though the library was closed and that she had learned that the student had entered through a window “over the art case on the stair landing.” As her appointment was for just one year, Dr. McKeag in the spring of 1914 wrote on her behalf to a potential employer a recommendation that commended her work at Wilson. Dr. McKeag stated: “My impressions of her work are favorable and to the best of my knowledge, she is a good librarian.”