{"id":23842,"date":"2020-04-20T19:42:14","date_gmt":"2020-04-20T19:42:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/?p=23842"},"modified":"2020-04-20T19:42:17","modified_gmt":"2020-04-20T19:42:17","slug":"morning-research-run-challenge-whats-the-story-behind-this-bench","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/2020\/04\/20\/morning-research-run-challenge-whats-the-story-behind-this-bench\/","title":{"rendered":"Morning research run challenge: what’s the story behind this bench?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Campus is so beautiful right now, painfully so because it is also so empty. This path is one of my very favorite on campus and I was drawn there early in the morning last week. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I wanted Rachel Lilley, super duper Public Services Archivist, to find this picture because I love how small the tree is! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It turns out this one was a real stumper! She still has some questions, so please do message us at scarc@oregonstate.edu<\/a> if you have answers… <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Just off the path bisecting\u00a0<\/a>McNary Field<\/a>, and roughly stationed at the point where all three paths meet, you\u2019ll find a\u00a0<\/a>roughly-hewn stone bench<\/a>.<\/a>\u00a0Edged in moss, and softly pitted from over a century of Oregon weather, the bench sits invitingly beneath what is now a massive deciduous tree. The plaque on the backrest reads:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0For H.R.S.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two roads diverged in the woods, I took the one less traveled “with you” and that has made all the difference.<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

From J.A.S<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The quote, of course, is a slightly altered line from Robert Frost\u2019s poem The Road Not Taken<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>first published in The Atlantic Monthly<\/em> in August 1915 and later included in his collection Mountain Interval<\/em> (1916).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Referred to as the \u201cCampus Seat<\/a>\u201d in a photograph captured the year it was installed, the stone bench was a gift of the class of 1903<\/a>. In an article in the Orange Owl in October 1926<\/a>, \u201cHistoric Monuments Found on Our Campus,\u201d Professor of Geology D. C. Livingston stated the seat was carved out of a rock that was deposited by a glacier in Oregon\u2019s prehistoric past. How the Class of \u201903 came by this massive stone is uncertain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Humorously, by 1920 the bench had earned a moniker a bit more salacious than \u201cCampus Seat\u201d \u2013 the \u201cFusser\u2019s Bench<\/a>\u201d (fussing was a term used in the 1920s<\/a><\/em> to mean \u201cnecking,\u201d or \u201cmaking out\u201d). In fact, the bench, situated on what was once called \u201cOld Administration<\/a>\u201d path, seems to have had a long history as a place of romance and assignations. The February 1928 edition of the Orange Owl<\/a> jokes that on the \u201cbench on lower campus there is a sign that reads: \u2018Class of \u201903.\u2019 Something must be wrong because you seldom see more than two there.\u201d As a senior, Frieda Linder, Associated Women Students President, wrote with fond nostalgia of the bench<\/a>: \u201cWe can visualize the stone bench of \u201903 drenched in blue moonlight, and recall with amusement the mad rush to reach home by closing hour on starry nights.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps not as romantically but more momentously, the class of 1927<\/a> buried its \u201cwill\u201d and the \u201cclass prophecy\u2026exactly one yard in front of the right leg of the stone bench,\u201d unearthing it 25 years later in 1952.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The dedication on the backrest, however, sadly remains a mystery. A search for \u201cbench\u201d in Oregon Digital<\/a>, though it revealed additional information about the bench itself, surfaced no information about the plaque, or the two people whose initials are inscribed there. Keeping in mind this was a gift of the Class of 1903, the initials could belong to two students who graduated that year and who later paid for the installation of the plaque. No two students with those initials graduated in 1903, however. In 1916, a year after The Road Not Taken<\/em> was published, Harley R. Shields and James A. Straughan<\/a> graduated from Oregon Agricultural College. But so too did James A. Sathers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This correspondent chose to abandon the search for matching initials in the yearbooks of the 1930s, but perhaps one of our readers will take it up. All our yearbooks are digitized as a set, and are available on Oregon Digital<\/a>. From the digital collection\u2019s main page, you can click on \u201cDecade\u201d along the left side of the page to narrow your search.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you <\/em>know the identities of the \u201cH.R.S\u201d and \u201cJ.A.S\u201d on the Class of 1903 bench? Please reach out and let us know (seriously, it\u2019s killing me)!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Campus is so beautiful right now, painfully so because it is also so empty. This path is one of my very favorite on campus and I was drawn there early in the morning last week. I wanted Rachel Lilley, super duper Public Services Archivist, to find this picture because I love how small the tree […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1451,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1451"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23842"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23847,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23842\/revisions\/23847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/scarc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}