Young Lawson graduated from Wabash in the \u201cCentennial\u201d Class of 1876 and this bright student\u00a0 went on to study medicine in Cincinnati. The first item that I opened was a very warm letter from Lawson\u2019s good friend Dr. Edmund O. Hovey\u00a0 written in November of 1876, the fall after Lawson\u2019s graduation. The letter is a great example of faculty to student, then alumnus, interaction in this time period. This letter seems to indicate that Lawson was a little more than a regular student, \u201cYour successor Mr. Coyle fills his office I believe pretty well. We miss \u201cLawson\u201d however in several respects. You earned a good reputation while you occupied that narrow room & performed the somewhat varied duties devolved upon you.\u201d The record does not say, but I wonder if Lawson might have been a lab assistant….<\/p>\n
Hovey\u2019s passion for his Cabinet was tied up with the notion of having real materials that Wabash students could touch and examine on the spot for a more effective learning experience. Many collections came about through donors, but in some instances the College bought them. When Hovey died he left the college many things, among them a catalog listing every item in the Cabinet.<\/p>\n A lasting record of Hovey’s lifelong passion for natural history.<\/p>\n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" William Terah Lawson [W1876] was one among hundreds of Hovey’s men. These former students who studied under, and came to adore, this brilliant and passionate naturalist went out into the world but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"w_featured_image_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/dearoldwabash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/dearoldwabash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/dearoldwabash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/dearoldwabash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/dearoldwabash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/dearoldwabash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/dearoldwabash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/dearoldwabash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/dearoldwabash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Also in this letter Hovey sends along a short summary of day to day life at the College. He includes <\/span>this bit of news, \u201cMy family is well & I work some upon the Cabinet nearly every day\u2026\u201d The \u201ccabinet\u201d Hovey refers to could also be described as his life\u2019s passion and was a\u00a0 sizable collection <\/span>of natural history specimens. In the Catalog of 1876 a description of the Cabinet says that it included <\/span>birds, plant samples, rocks and minerals, \u201c\u2026especially <\/span>rich in coal, ores of gold, silver, mercury, copper, lead and iron\u2026\u201d Collected over his lifetime, Hovey\u2019s Cabinet was so large that it came to fill the Polytechnic Gymnasium which was then renamed the Hovey Museum.Here is a great image of part of the collection in the Museum.<\/p>\n
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