Progress Report, 4/10/03

This topic submitted by Crazy Asia, Macwooab, J-BidoubleZY, Hoey (singsora@muohio.edu) on 4/10/03. Additions were last made on Thursday, April 10, 2003. Section: Burt and Ernie

This morning, we set up our site with Hays so that we are able to easily post our project. Then we went to the Lane Library Archives...

What a fascinating place! And how different Western used to be!

We asked the lady for assistance with finding stuff about Western College and the Western Pond. She returned with folders upon folders full of old documents and photos, which was really interesting. We got a good feel for the atmosphere of this campus when it was still the Western College Seminary for Women. It was amazing to see the change over time, in both the campus and even the pond itself. We also found some old Miami yearbooks and laughed at the goofy old pictures of Karen's dad. Yay.

What we discovered was that the pond was used much more than it is today. It was a social gathering and recreation place, the swans didn't kick out every creature that came near it, and the boathouse was much more useful. People used to just hang around the pond for no reason, ice skate, play hockey, and fish. We also noticed in the pictures that there were many changes to the pond over time, as can be seen in the images below. The dam did some obvious damage to the pond. The water level was raised a tremendous amount, which made the boat house (and in some of the sources, refered to as the "ice house") useless. Once they did build the dam and put the stone bridge and walls around the pond, there were no longer pictures of the pond being used for human recreation, but rather just aesthics. The stone wall that was built right next to the boat house has broken down over time, and now half of it no longer exists. We also found photo evidence of certain creatures that used to thrive in the pond that are no longer there (we presume because of the evil swans...) We photocopied some old black and white photos and scanned some. The ones that are being scanned will be sent to us soon via e-mail.