The words and family of Emporia State University’s first president helped celebrate the 144th anniversary of ESU’s founding on Monday.
This year’s Founders Day celebrations centered on the recently published memoirs of Lyman Beecher Kellogg, the president and first teacher of what was then Kansas State Normal School from 1865 to 1871. The memoirs were edited and published by ESU historian Sam Dicks, who received the papers from the family in 2000.
“The memoirs had been transcribed by my father, so I had read them when I was in high school,” said Claire Kellogg of Oregon, a great-granddaughter of Kellogg. “I used it as a primary reference for a school paper.”
Eventually, she said, the family decided the memoirs should be kept where they would have the most meaning. That led to a meeting with Dicks and the memoirs’ eventual publication in 2006.
“We’ve just felt very gratified that someone had taken the project on,” Claire Kellogg said. “We just thought the memoirs would be kept in the archives, but his editing and publishing them makes all the difference in the world. It’s the best possible result.”
Claire Kellogg, her son Ross Kellogg Betzer and her sister Sue Harris took turns reading from Kellogg’s memoirs at a Founders Day luncheon in the Colonial Ballroom of the ESU Memorial Union. Chris Walker, the publisher of The Emporia Gazette, read from a eulogy of Kellogg by William Allen White.
One selection from the memoirs recalled the 16-year-old Kellogg’s gift for good handwriting and his father’s decision to make him a writing teacher. A nervous Kellogg found every excuse in the book not to take the job.
“Father said it was all nonsense,” Betzer read. “I could teach writing lessons as well as Mr. Trumbull could. And anyway, it was all arranged.”
Another account, read by Claire Kellogg, detailed Kellogg’s difficulties in reaching Emporia. At one stage, he crossed the frozen Mississippi River on foot, just in time to hear the ice start breaking. Another stretch of the journey found him one of 10 people aboard a stagecoach built for far fewer passengers. He spent part of the journey on another passenger’s lap.
Harris read a selection about Kellogg’s first day of teaching in Emporia. The seats and desks had not yet come, so settees had to be borrowed from the Congregational Church. Kellogg walked into the classroom at one minute before nine, faced his 18 hopeful students, and began reading the parable of the sower.
None of the 18 had taken any sort of entrance examination for admission, Harris said.
“It was assumed they were all qualified and therefore to be admitted to the school,” she said.
“It’s amazing to see what has come and how all the people who followed him have made it like this,” Harris added, to applause.
ESU President Michael Lane, the university’s 15th president, thanked the family and Dicks for the memoirs.
“I told Sam he had one down and 13 to go,” Lane said with a smile. “I don’t want him making a history of me for at least another 10 to 12 years.”