This is a guest post by Sarah L. Woodford, director of the Vincent Library at Saint Thomas More, the Catholic Chapel & Center at Yale University.

In his July 1983 article in The Catholic Historical Review Herbert Janick observes that Father Thomas Lawrason Riggs ’10, the first Catholic chaplain at Yale, was “both an intellectual respected for his secular accomplishments and a Catholic priest.” It then seems fitting that the two archives on campus that house his papers are Saint Thomas More, the Catholic Chapel & Center at Yale University and Yale’s Manuscripts and Archives in Sterling Memorial Library. Riggs bequeathed most of his personal and professional papers to the Saint Thomas More Corporation; but those papers and personal items, particularly pertaining to his bright college years, the immediate years afterwards, and his contributions to academic scholarship were donated to Manuscripts and Archives.

Photograph of T. Lawrason Riggs from Scroll and Key senior album, 1910. Call number: Yeg2 K61x 1910.

Born in 1888 to the Riggs banking family of Washington, D.C., Riggs was a graduating member of Yale University’s Class of 1910. While at university, Riggs studied English literature and French, Italian, Latin, and Greek. He was both a member of Scroll and Key and the Pundit Society, as well as the president of the Yale Dramatic Society (where he met his future roommate and musical theater collaborator, Cole Porter ’13). A renowned poet on campus, first as a contributor to the Yale Literary Magazine and then as the publication’s editor during his senior year, he penned the official class song for the class of 1910.

After Yale, Riggs pursued graduate work at Harvard University under the direction of Barrett Wendell. There he roomed with Dean Acheson ’15 (a future secretary of state in the administration of President Harry S. Truman) and Cole Porter (a future popular composer and entertainer), who were both pursuing law degrees. Neither Riggs nor Porter finished their Harvard degrees, instead they focused on the writing of See America First, a Broadway show financed by Riggs and pronounced a flop by New York critics in March 1916.

World War I brought Riggs back to the Yale. In the summer of 1917, months after the United States declared war on Germany, the twenty-nine-year-old joined The Yale Mobile Hospital Unit as a translator. After leaving the Yale Unit and gaining a foreign-language specialist position assigned to military intelligence in Paris, were he also acquired the rank of first lieutenant, Riggs decided to enter into the Catholic priesthood. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1922 and after a trip to Europe to consult with the Catholic chaplains at Cambridge and Oxford, took up residency at Yale.

One of the “designs” Riggs bequeathed to Saint Thomas More, the Catholic Chapel & Center at Yale University, circa 1938. The Fr. Riggs Papers, Saint Thomas More.

Riggs spent his tenure as Catholic chaplain entertaining young Catholic creatives at his lavish home on Whitney Avenue, building what is now Saint Thomas More Chapel, and pursuing a book project about Joan of Arc. His book Saving Angel: The Truth about Joan of Arc and the Church, was published posthumously in 1944 by The Bruce Publishing Company of Milwaukee. Riggs died unexpectedly of a heart attack on April 26, 1943. He was fifty-five. In his will, drawn up in November 1938, he bequeathed all his “papers, books, correspondence, records and designs” that concern or have to do with Saint Thomas More, to the Saint Thomas More Corporation. All other papers, books, and correspondence that did not interest the Corporation, were to go to Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University.

Among the items Riggs bequeathed to Manuscripts and Archives were two Scroll and Key senior albums, from 1909 and 1910. The former from his brother, Francis, who graduated the year before him, and the latter from Riggs’s senior year. Both albums are leather-bound and contain black and white photos of the society’s senior members with their signatures underneath. Riggs’s 1910 album also contains a snapshot of the secret society’s ivy-covered tomb in the album’s last frame.

Recipes to prepare for injured soldiers, part of Riggs’s training for the Yale Mobile Hospital Unit, 1917. Thomas Lawrason Riggs Papers (MS 704), Box 1, Folder 9. Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.

Riggs also donated a collection of his notes and papers that now make up the Riggs Papers. Items of note include his typed manuscript of Saving Angel and a notebook from 1917 that contains notes from his training for the Yale Mobile Hospital Unit. The notebook is blank in the middle and its back portion contains notes in pencil dated July 18-21. These notes instruct on how to identify contagious diseases, bandage various sprains, set broken bones, and prepare meals for the injured (poached eggs and cocoa are two items on the menu). There is also a particularly sobering section that describes the different sorts of poisonous gas a soldier could inhale, how to identify them, and which ones would prove fatal.

As Saint Thomas More, the Catholic Chapel & Center at Yale University celebrates eighty years in October 2018, the community once more considers its beginnings and the priest at the center of those beginnings. Riggs was a chaplain and a Yale man—how appropriate that like his life, the archives that continue to keep his memory reflect this as well.

Petition regarding Commons, page 1, circa 1800-1801, Bates Family Papers (MS 65), Box 1, folder 5

In a December 1995 “Old Yale” column from the Yale Alumni Magazine, Chief Research Archivist Judy Schiff traces the history of dissatisfaction with dining facilities, service, and fare all the way back to the opening of the first Yale College building in New Haven in 1718. Sometime in 1800-1801, more than two and a half decades before the infamous Bread and Butter Rebellion of 1828, four members of the Class of 1802 sent a petition to Yale President Timothy Dwight protesting against the immoral and wicked behavior of the kitchen staff. The petition survives in Box 1, folder 5 of the Bates Family Papers (MS 65) in Manuscripts and Archives. Herewith the text of the petition:

To the President of Yale College.

Sir,

Sensible of the important purposes for which the Commons was originally designed, and convinced of the salutary consequences of which they might still be productive, we cannot but regret the unfortunate perversion of so valuable an institution.

With these impressions, and with the presumption that the President is ignorant of the conduct of those employed in the Hall, we beg leave respectfully to remonstrate, and submit to his consideration the following facts.

• 1st. We have satisfactory proof that they have unwarrantably converted to their own use sundry articles belonging to the kitchen.
• 2d .They have served up a part of our provision, in a more palatable manner, which, for a pecuniary reward, they have appropriated to the use of individuals.
• 3d. They have continually harboured the low, riotous, and immoral inhabitants of this town.
• 4th. They are destitute of cleanliness.
• 5th. By deserting the hall, for the purpose of prosecuting their own private, they have shamefully neglected the duties of their occupation.
• 6th. They have in the presence of the more young and inexperienced students, traduced the character of the Authority.
• 7th. They admit into the hall, to the exclusion of others, those who will furnish them with spiritous liquors.
• 8th. They have appropriated to their own use much more than an equitable portion of the better provisions provided by the steward.
• 9th. They are notorious for excessive drinking.
• 10th. They are openly profane.
• 11th. They constantly violate the sabbath, by admitting into their company disreputable persons, and by diverting themselves with ludicrous and improper amusements.

It is therefore the unanimous request of the Junior Class that for these and many other improprieties, the President would take into consideration the conduct of the Cooks and make such regulations as he shall think proper.

Isaac C. Bates, Wm. F. Brainard, Jeremiah Evarts, Junius Smith, Committee in behalf of the Class

Petition regarding Commons, page 2, circa 1800-1801, Bates Family Papers (MS 65), Box 1, folder 5

The “Commons” in question in the petition was the first separately standing Commons building on Yale’s Old Campus. It was built in 1782 as a dining hall, or Commons, and designed by Jeremiah Atwater. It’s location was behind South Middle College (today’s Connecticut Hall) and behind the Chapel Street location where Street Hall was eventually constructed in 1864, approximately in the present location of the southern end of McClellan Hall. It served as the dining commons for Yale College students until 1820, when a larger Commons building was constructed nearby. From 1820-1888 the building was used as a chemical laboratory and known as the Old Laboratory, and from 1885-1887 also served as the first home for the Yale Cooperative Society (which after 1893 became the Yale Cooperative Corporation). The building was demolished in 1888, contemporaneously with the construction of the new Kent Chemical Laboratory building across High St. from the Old Library (now Dwight Hall) at the corner of Library St. (on a site now occupied by Jonathan Edwards College).

And what of the four members of the Class of 1802 selected by their classmates to petition the Yale College president seeking some kind of redress for the perceived abuses of the Commons staff?

• Isaac Chapman Bates (January 23, 1779-March 16, 1845) practiced law in Northampton, Massachusetts, and later served in the U.S. House of Representatives (1827-1835) and the U.S. Senate (1841-1845) representing Massachusetts.
• William F. Brainard practiced law in his hometown of New London, Connecticut.
• Jeremiah F. Evarts (February 3, 1781-May 10, 1831) also was a lawyer, served for many years as treasurer then secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. He was one of the leading opponents of Indian removal, and engaged in lobbying efforts attempting unsuccessfully to defeat the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
• Junius Smith (1780-1853) also practiced law, and later in his life was a determined supporter of efforts to build a fleet of transatlantic steam ships.

John Russell Pope. Illustrations by O.R. Eggers. Yale University: A Plan for Its Future Building. New York: Cheltenham Press, 1919. “A general view of the University as proposed.”

Nearing the end of the second decade of the twentieth century, as the new Memorial Quadrangle dormitory buildings were approaching completion, the President and Corporation of Yale University hired the architect John Russell Pope to devise a plan for the expansion of the university. Pope’s plan aimed “to call attention to the immediate necessity of creating and safeguarding a good, orderly, practical arrangement of architectural harmony and beauty in the existing and future structures of Yale University and to present a plan whereby this result may be attained.” The resulting publication, Yale University: A Plan for Its Future Building, with illustrations by O.R. Eggers, was printed by the Cheltenham Press of New York City in 1919 in an edition of 250 copies. This large and beautifully illustrated book envisions a Yale campus rapidly expanding to meet the needs of a twentieth-century university.

It is fascinating to contemplate some of the changes that Pope suggested, but that were never in fact implemented. Elements of Pope’s plan can be seen in today’s Yale campus, but the plan was significantly revised during the building boom of the 1920s and 1930s, overseen primarily by architect and Yale alumnus James Gamble Rogers (B.A. 1889).

John Russell Pope. Illustrations by O.R. Eggers. Yale University: A Plan for Its Future Building. New York: Cheltenham Press, 1919. “The Square as seen from the New Campus at College Street corner, looking towards the new Wall Street gateway to Church Street.”

Pope conceptualized a focal dividing point between the city of New Haven and the university, instantiated in an arched entryway at the intersection of Wall and Temple Streets with wings of the surrounding building stretching towards Church Street. Behind the arched entryway, Pope’s plan included a group of Gothic buildings surrounding a central Square, off of which emanated the two principle spokes of Wall Street and Hillhouse Avenue, along which his New Campus buildings would be constructed in a harmonizing unification of many existing campus structures.

John Russell Pope. Illustrations by O.R. Eggers. Yale University: A Plan for Its Future Building. New York: Cheltenham Press, 1919. “A general view of the proposed treatment of Hillhouse Avenue and Hillhouse group area.”

Pope’s plan preserved the science focus of the buildings along lower Hillhouse Avenue that had accompanied the development of the Sheffield Scientific School over the latter half of the nineteenth century, and expanded them northward culminating in a new observatory tower at the end of the axis. It also envisioned extending Hillhouse Avenue so that it intersected with the new Square centered around Wall Street.

Pope called for a New Campus, stretching from York Street towards the new Square along his Wall Street axis, uniting Yale’s existing Old Campus and the newly constructed Memorial Quadrangle with his overall plan. His plan indicates a new Library building between Wall and Grove Streets and occupying most of the area between the 1901 Bicentennial Buildings (Woolsey Hall, Memorial Hall, and Commons) and York Street, covering space now occupied by the Beinecke Library and the Sterling Law Buildings. Pope’s envisioned library was a towering Perpendicular Gothic cathedral, more awe-inspiring and perhaps less functional than the Collegiate Gothic Sterling Memorial Library structure that James Gamble Rogers eventually built slightly farther south. The tower of Pope’s library, facilitated by the removal of Durfee Hall, was conceived as a focal point connecting Yale’s Old Campus to Pope’s vision for a twentieth-century Yale University.

John Russell Pope. Illustrations by O.R. Eggers. Yale University: A Plan for Its Future Building. New York: Cheltenham Press, 1919. “Looking from the main vestibule into the Reading Room of the Library.”

John Russell Pope. Illustrations by O.R. Eggers. Yale University: A Plan for Its Future Building. New York: Cheltenham Press, 1919. “A view from the Old Campus looking towards the Library–the removal of Durfee Hallopens an avenue connecting the Old Campus with the new and creates a fine vista terminating at the Library tower.”

The letters of Carter Henry Harrison (Class of 1845) of Lexington, Kentucky, written to his mother, Caroline E. Harrison, while he was a student at Yale College, provide a fascinating glimpse into student life at Yale in the middle of the 19th century. Carter’s letters, a small part of the Yale Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection (MS 1258, Box 9, Folder 343), comprise eight letters written between 1842 and 1845.

The letter dated 15 January 1843 is especially poignant because it reports the death in the college the previous week of an unnamed student who was Carter’s “only intimate acquaintance at this place … one of the most amiable boys [he] ever saw.” The student had “been sick eleven days (that is in bed) with the billious fever.” He discusses his own feelings about this sudden death of a fellow student, and reports that the boy’s father had not yet even arrived at Yale following notification of his son’s illness. Carter’s sentiments and his reassurances to his mother about his own well being are reminders of the profound physical and emotional distances from home experienced by many Yale College students in past centuries.

Carter also discusses at length the preaching and religious considerations that were a part of the Yale College curriculum at the time, reflecting a very different educational and social environment than that encountered by Yale students from the latter 19th century to the present. The first page of the letter contains a contemporary woodcut of the Yale campus, the Old Brick Row, to which Carter has added a legend identifying the buildings. He closes his letter with information to his mother about how some of these buildings function in his daily routine as a student. While his labels under the buildings in the woodcut are correct, he has gotten north and south reversed in his listing of the buildings in the legend. A typed transcription of the letter is available.