LUCY MAYNARD SALMON
1853 - 1927
Professor Lucy Maynard Salmon whose death occurred
on February 14, 1927 had been a member of the faculty
of Vassar College since 1887. Called to Vassar in
order to promote the study of history she organized
the department of history of which for nearly forty
years she remained the head. During all these years
to her colleagues and to successive generations of
students she was an unfailing source of inspiration.
Outside the college as well as within Miss Sa1mon's
influence was widely felt, through her connection
with the American Historical Association and through
her published works. In 1912 she was honored by the
degree of Doctor of Literature from Colgate and in
1926 by that of Doctor of Letters from the University
of Michigan.
At this time, however, it is no mere objective enumer-
ation of her achievements which the faculty would
record. It wishes also to place on record its sense
of the significance of these achievements. In the
first place she contributed to the study of history
in this country not only her own enlarging definitions
of the subject, and her own valuable research to her
field, but she also trained many workers, younger fol-
lowers "made" as we say by her teaching. These, car-
rying on the work of research and teaching in their
own vigorous measure, contribute the most lasting
memorial that can be founded. Moreover the young wom-
en in her classes went out not only with a new sense
of the meaning of history and with an equipment in
fundamental methods of work but also with a sense of
their responsibility to the comunities in which they
might happen to live.
To this development of scholars in her own field must
be added the quickening of intellectual curiosity
that came to many from contact with her living mind.
The greatest impulse to thinking independently comes
frm another mind in action. By reason of her in-
fluence the ordinary world of streets and alleys, signs
and show-windows, changing work of every kind has been
made a richer document. To this unwritten history,
which she taught many to use, must be added the store
of historical documents, formal and informal, that
have extended the Vassar Library shelves year after
year, and which in any cement however brief, must be
noted. Vassar owes in great measure its growing
LUCY MAYNARD SALMON (Continued)
library and the library habits of its students to
Miss Salmon's continuous interest in the amassing of
material, however difficult to obtain, and to the
thorough ability to use such material that she in-
sisted upon.
The loss to her colleagues of Miss Salmon's cooper-
ation extends beyond this recognized withdrawal of
her direct contribution to her students. Her fel-
low-workers on the faculty were always aware of the
fact that her interest in education was never limited
to her own field of research or to her own teaching
activities or those of her department. She was never
in doubt as to what a liberal college is or how it
should serve the world. She steadily questioned its
relation to its immediate community in social and
educational ways, its stand on all matters of national
educational interest. Her scrutiny of its internal
organization and effectiveness never flagged.
This persistent examination of every attitude, rela-
tionship, custom or educational policy has been pro-
vocative and fruitful. Again and again ideas and
plans which she suggested and which appeared to be
remote or impractical ideals have come to be gener-
ally accepted and completely realized. The faculty
owes to Miss Salmon's initiative many of the measures
it has sought to make effective since nineteen hundred
and thirteen, when she made her significant address to
the faculty in which she urged it to look to its life,
and know what it was doing and why it was doing it.
She stood for faculty participation in college govern-
ment, in administrative as well as educational aspects,
and for closer and more intelligent relations with the
trustees and alumnae than she thought had yet been
worked out.
It is our sense of this significance of the work of
Miss Salmon which the faculty wishes to place on re-
cord - of a colleague who was a pioneer in education
and whose ideals have left a deep impress on the life
of Vassar College.
Fanny Borden
Rose Jeffries Peebles
Eloise Ellery
VII - 201-204