“Our Crowd” [with our favorite teachers at Peabody Normal College]

Students and faculty at Peabody Normal College enjoyed close relationships. In this photograph, students pose in front of the vine-covered Literary Department Building with teachers Julia Anne Sears (mathematics), Mary Elizabeth Wiggin Jones (director of the gymnasium for young women), John Lynn Lampson (Latin and Greek), Hiram Albert Vance (English language, rhetoric and oratory), Wickliffe Rose (philosophy and mathematics), Chancellor of the University and President of the College William Harold Payne (history, theory and art of education), and Mary Elizabeth Cheney (vocal music). Student names on the back of the photograph indicate home states of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, and Virginia. In 1893, Peabody’s enrollment was at a peak of 500 thanks in large part to Payne’s predecessor, Eben Stearns, who convinced the Peabody Education Fund to support $200 scholarships for students from southern states beginning in 1878. Of the nine students here (Antoinette is visiting her sister, who is a scholarship student but not pictured), four are scholarship students.