Mayday Memory Work — Gatherings Partnership

Written by Maria Meindl

Abstract

Founded in 1881, Alma Ladies’ College in St. Thomas, Ontario drew in young women from all over the world before closing in 1988. Life at Alma was richly documented in photographs, newspaper coverage, personal memoirs, films, pamphlets and other and ephemera, focusing particularly on the school’s tradition of performance. An amphitheatre created in 1930 became a site for performance of all kinds including dance, drama, music and physical culture, as well as rituals to mark various holidays. Especially beloved and well documented was the annual May Day celebration, including the crowning of the May Queen and the students’ performances for her court. Though the Alma site was destroyed by fire in 2008, its archives are preserved and readily available online through the Elgin County Archives. In the summer of 2019, Maria Meindl partnered with the Elgin County Archives, exploring its extensive collection and meeting with a group of alumni to pilot a group interview format. Prompted by print documentation and a recently acquired film, these women drew on their strong relationships and sense of community to unearth and contextualize memories from the May Day celebrations of 1948 and 49.

May Day Memory Work at the Elgin County Archives

“Do you think it was over there?”

“There, more likely.”

I stood peering through the grid of a tall steel fence with Gina Dewaele of the Elgin County Archives. We tried to make sense of what lay in front of us, an expanse of dry ground, rutted with tire-marks, and in the distance: trees. I walked along the fence, searching fruitlessly for an opening. Instead, I saw the remains of a stone gate, bordered by tall grass, tiger lilies, and vines heavy with blackberries. The fence that was keeping us out had created a rich grazing ground for animals, birds and insects. At least for now.

[click on an image to enlarge]

This site in St. Thomas Ontario was once the grounds of Alma College, a school for young women which opened in 1881 (Riddell 11). Built in Victorian Gothic style, in the yellow brick which is used often in the area, Alma College focused on music, art, literature, elocution and physical culture. It lasted just over a century, closing due to financial hardship in 1988 (72). Then its buildings stood empty for twenty years before burning to the ground. The conflagration was captured on numerous camera phones, a scene straight out of a Brontë novel immortalized on Youtube.

But the college has not faded from memory. Founded in 1901, its alumni association still meets on a regular basis. It has commissioned two books on the history of Alma College and has strong ties with the Elgin County Archives, which houses the Alma College collection. The archive has a robust program of digitization, making photographs and other memorabilia available to researchers from near and far.

Image 2: Amphitheatre Booklet. Courtesy of Elgin County Archives. (R6 S4 Sh6 B5 F3)

In the woods beyond the fence, Gina and I were trying to establish the location of the college’s amphitheatre, which formally opened in 1930 (Butlin 13) and provided seating for up to 800 people (Riddell 38). A system of pipes was installed soon after the amphitheatre was built, creating a water curtain. This masked changes of scenery and provided a backdrop on which coloured lights could be projected. The ensuing effect was described as “enchanting” (Dobson 6). The amphitheatre was a storied place. Alma’s then-principal Perry Dobson wrote that the location was a former creek-bed which had become a dumping ground for the community, with “discarded eaves-troughs, baby carriages, cook stoves, wire mattresses, all intermixed with coal ashes and cinders, to say nothing of rotting garbage, with a bit of sewage trickling through” (1). The college purchased the land and protected it, “(b)ut there was still the hole” (1). Writing in the third person, Dobson recalls attaching a hose to a fire hydrant one day: “Then, what fun he had as he turned a gushing stream of water on the dirt and piles of ashes surrounding the dump” (2).

Image 3: St. Thomas TJ Consecration. Courtesy of Elgin County Archives. (R6 S4 to 2 M6 and 7)

At its dedication speech, reported in the St. Thomas Times-Journal, Dr. Edmund H. Oliver brought up a nearby archeological site, the Southwold Earthworks, “the remains of a once great race of people.”[1] He was likely referring to the Chonnonton people (also known as the Attiwandaron), sometimes called the Neutrals because of their position in conflicts between the Wendat Confederacy and the Haudenosaunee (Dickason and Newbigging 84).

The Chonnonton people had disappeared or disbursed by the mid 1600s due to disease, famine (Jackes 365), and other effects of colonization (Dickason and Newbigging 90-1). However, by the time the amphitheatre was consecrated there were other nations in close proximity to St. Thomas: the Oneidas of the Thames, the Chippewas of the Thames, and the Munsee Delaware Nation.

Oliver went on to remark that the site of the amphitheatre also held historic remains: “a sort of ash place, a Gehenna. It has been turned into a beauty place – beauty for ashes.” In recounting the origins of the amphitheatre, he referred to the Christian hymn, “He Gave Me Beauty for Ashes,” and concluded, “We find here the notes of beauty, art, literature, reverence for the past, and appreciation of the folk. We find it being made into an appreciation of the universal song.”

The amphitheatre, and the performances taking place in it became the focus and inspiration for a wealth of documentation. Alma was seen, from the start, as a cultural centre within the Southwestern Ontario community of St. Thomas (Riddell 19),[2] and it became the subject of newspaper coverage, both in St. Thomas and in neighbouring London. In the 1920s, the St. Thomas Times Journal ran regular columns called "Alma College Notes," and "Alma College Activities."[3] There were entries in the student journal, the Almafilian, not to mention a scrupulously maintained archive at the school itself. The amphitheatre was the site not only of plays, dance performances, concerts and graduation ceremonies, but of demonstrations of physical culture. A torchlight Christmas carol service took place there each year (Riddell 38), not to mention a much-loved and long-remembered event: the annual crowning of the May Queen.

Despite the richness of its heritage, Alma College is hardly a household name. I learned about it myself through word of mouth, just after the death of my grandmother, the poet and broadcaster Mona Gould. When she read Mona’s obituary, Judge Edra Sanders Ferguson – one of the most famous Alma Daughters – invited me to a meeting at the University Women’s Club. There, she and a number of her schoolmates told me stories about my grandmother’s years as a young reporter in St. Thomas (see Butlin 99-100).[4] The conversation soon turned to memories of the women’s schooldays at Alma College. They recalled that from the start, Alma was a sort of United Nations, bringing not just young women from the local area, but international students to live and learn together. The school began by including a variety of Christian denominations and later welcomed students of different religions, as well (Butlin 44).

Image 6: Edra Sanders amid debating team. Courtesy of Elgin County Archives. Winners of Girls' Series of Western Ontario Secondary School Association, 1926. Left to Right: Ruth Sparling, Mary Sibley, Edra Sanders, Betty Andrew, Irma Walker. ( R6 S3 … — Image 6: Edra Sanders amid debating team. Courtesy of Elgin County Archives.
Winners of Girls' Series of Western Ontario Secondary School Association, 1926. Left to Right: Ruth Sparling, Mary Sibley, Edra Sanders, Betty Andrew, Irma Walker. ( R6 S3 Sh3 B4 141 )

Image 7: International students. Courtesy of Elgin County Archives. (R6 S4 to 2 M6 and 7)

Some years later I met a native of St. Thomas who had attended Alma. Her family was originally from Greece, and she told me she felt like an outsider, a lesser member of the student body. But all that changed one spring day. Now her face broke into a smile, and her eyes teared up as she told me of the day her schoolmates found her in the kitchen (where she worked) and announced that she was to be that year’s May Queen. She described a procession, white dresses, garlands of flowers, and dancing under the apple blossoms on a warm spring day. This was a Cinderella story, but instead of a handsome prince, it was a group of friends who swept in and changed this young woman’s life. My husband and I visited the derelict site soon afterwards, wandering among the saplings and weeds which were springing up among the crumbling buildings, along with evidence of numerous campfires and late-night parties. I stole a brick.

When the opportunity arose to do some archival research on performance history through Gatherings, May Day at Alma College immediately sprang to mind, and I contacted the Elgin County Archives. It so happened that not long before I phoned, a 16mm colour film had been donated. It documented the May Day celebrations of 1948 and 49, followed by the graduation ceremonies of both years. In the summer of 2019, I worked with the Elgin County Archives, using the film as a focus for discovering the history of the amphitheatre, particularly of the May Day ritual.

Access Film: https://inmagic.elgin.ca/ask/permalink/175233/

[Courtesy of Elgin County Archives. Elgin County Audio-Visual Collection.]

I had two goals. One was to put the Alma College Collection on the map as a source for research on performance history in Southern Ontario. At Alma young women created and shared performance of all kinds, not simply music, dance, theatre and physical culture, but also rituals, and much of this activity took place in the amphitheatre. My second goal was to try a group oral history interview, modelled on Reminiscence Cafés in the United Kingdom. The latter are sometimes set up by chapters of the Alzheimer’s Society and use photographs, music and activities to help stimulate memory and reinforce identity. However, they also appear in conjunction with reminiscence theatre. For Rikke Gjærum reminiscence theatre serves the purpose of promoting health through connectedness among the elderly, an often-marginalized population (246). It also draws on the resources that older members of society can offer (247). I recalled the web of long-standing relationships I encountered during my visit to the University Women’s Club. What memories would surface if the graduates of Alma recalled May Day, together?

Image 8: May Queen and her court, 1948. Courtesy of Elgin County Archives. (R6 S3 Sh3 B7 128)

Courtesy of Elgin County Archives.

Alma College was not alone in celebrating May Day but it adopted the custom wholeheartedly starting in 1921 (Butlin 10).[5] The celebration moved to the amphitheatre as soon as the facility was built. Through depression, world war, and post-war upheavals, the event maintained a remarkable consistency through the years. Each year, the students selected one young woman to be the May Queen, along with two counsellors. The Lord of the May, who crowned the queen during the ceremony, was selected by the staff (Sifton 2). Preceded by young flower girls and musicians, the May Queen and her court moved in solemn procession into the amphitheatre witnessed by friends, family, alumni, students and community members. She would then be crowned and say her vows. Positioned on a dais, the court would be entertained by a series of dances, songs, recitations and demonstrations of physical culture, including a Maypole dance.

The event is scrupulously archived, including the scripts for the May Queen’s vows, and a Memory Book with signatures of the May Queen, her court and of the various alumni who attended and sent written greetings. The programs were kept as well, listing every performer and participant. The programs indicate the importance of dance within the school’s curriculum. Dance was not only a form of self expression but of cultural exploration, as there were many folk-dances included. Sometimes international students would perform dances from their own countries.

The documentation shows clear links between the physical culture practiced at Alma College and the tradition of Francois Delsarte, widely popularized in North America by Genevieve Stebbins (Ruyter 2020, 2025). A program from the 1912 commencement exercises lists the Eastern Temple Drill as performed by the Senior Physical Culture class (Riddell 30). This Drill is found in Stebbins’s 1898 book, The Genevieve Stebbins System of Physical Training (84-90). The same book also includes an “English Drill” called The May (19-5). Programs from the 1920s and 30s mention a department of Expression, another name that Stebbins used for her work (1886, 1898 133). The film shows a processional dance performed barefoot with half-circles of flowers held over the dancers’ heads (Branton 1:45 – 2:12). A similar dance is depicted in a book on the work of Hedwig Kallmeyer, a student of Stebbins (cover, frontispiece, 12). The documentation of May Day celebrations at Alma College is evidence of the prevalence and persistence of physical culture in southern Ontario.

The group interview took place in the Elgin County Museum/Heritage Centre, which is adjacent to the Archives. The participants, Jean Dollar (née McKellar) and Evelyn Smith (née Knight) Louise Sifton (née Lyle), and Mary Virginia Towers sat at a long table, watching the film and matching it with materials from the collection including programs, music and scripts. The interview was recorded on both audio and video. In addition to discussing their memories, they sorted and ordered the material in the Elgin County Archive’s May Day files. Some had brought materials with them to donate, along with their own historical writings. Louise Sifton had chosen the May Day celebration as the topic for an essay in a university anthropology course, and Mary Virginia Towers had also written about the history of the amphitheatre.

We decided to show the film one time through, and encourage the women to free-associate. On the second viewing, we stopped the film, matching what they saw to the programs and other print materials that the archives had in its holdings. For the sake of time, we decided to focus on the May Day celebrations. I had formulated a series of questions in consultation with the Elgin County Archives. My questions centred on finding out what the film did not show: the sounds and smells of the day, what was involved in preparing for the event, and what came afterwards. I also planned to ask about their feelings, and what the event meant to them.

Image 17: Left to right: Jean, Evelyn, Louise, Mary Virginia.

The interview itself turned out to be more chaotic than anticipated, with people coming and going, and the conversation veering off into what might have been called digressions, except that they offered useful information. Whatever experience I have in interviewing – be it in qualitative research or in radio – has led me to frame my questions in such a way that a concise and clean quote is produced, without the need for much editing. Even as an interview proceeds, a part of me is imagining listening to the tape, wincing when an answer is too diffuse or is cut off at the end. In the group interview, I kept wanting to clean things up, single out one woman at a time and make the pointed and slightly challenging inquiries that I knew would produce a distinctive clip. The results of the group interview would not be useful for creating a radio program or the soundtrack of a film, but they were a rich source of information. They could also form the basis for individual oral history interviews. To satisfy my concern about clips, I made a point of setting up segments of the recording where they would read from their writings, sing the school song, and answer a few key questions.

I witnessed the dynamic between these women, the group project of memory work. More and more details emerged as the day proceeded and they supported each other’s memory-building. Not only were they able to identify people in the film and describe the proceedings in detail, they also expanded their wide-ranging discussion to include elements of town history.[6] This interview was not just providing information for future researchers, it was reinforcing community and relationships, not only among the Alma College graduates, but inter-generationally, as well, as I, the Elgin County Staff, the film-maker and visitors became part of the project of memory work. I closed the interview by asking what they would wish to see done with the site of the amphitheatre in the future. They spoke of the need for housing in St. Thomas, and said that Alma was “in the past” though there should be a photograph of the school in whatever building is built on the site.

They also spoke of restoring the amphitheatre to look like “the original, beautiful amphitheatre that it was before.” It could be used for weddings. Here is their concluding discussion.

Towers: There’s lots of use for it: plays, concerts, church services . . .
Dollar: Weddings, beautiful spot for weddings.
Towers: Many uses. It would be well used.

footnotes

The exact date and page of this publication has been cut off, but it is from spring or summer, 1930.
Performance had long been an important part of life in St. Thomas. According to historian Hugh Joffre Sims, visiting companies had offered performances in an old drill shed near the town hall. With the building of the Opera House in 1873 came even more visiting performances including minstrel shows, Tom Thumb’s Company of Lilliputians, and a travelling version of The Merchant of Venice (82). The Agricultural Gardens, near the tracks of the London Port Stanley Railway, had seen visitors as famous as Buffalo Bill Cody (Sims 75). With the growth of the town in the early 1900s, more theatres were built, offering both vaudeville performances and movies (88, 91, 93, 99).
Back issues of the St. Thomas Times Journal are available on microfilm at the St. Thomas public library.
Judge Ferguson was awarded the Order of Canada just before her death, at the age of 104. It was Tara Mazumdar, an employee of nursing home where Ferguson spent her last years, who found out about Ferguson’s career through the scrap books the elderly Ferguson kept in her room. On her own time, Mazumdar assembled the necessary documentation. The fight to have the award given at the nursing home, rather than at Rideau Hall, was detailed in the Toronto Star (Gillis).
The Whitby Public Library has scanned photographs of May Day Celebrations at Ontario Ladies’ College. The College, now known as Trafalgar Castle School, still celebrates a May Court Festival.
Of particular interest was the relationship between the performances at Alma (particularly but not entirely the May Day celebrations) and the local woman-owned sewing business.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Gina Dewaele, Mike Baker and Brian Masschaele of the County of Elgin, as well as to Drs. Kim Solga and Jill Carter for their support in formulating this project.

For images used courtesy of Elgin County Archives, any subsequent reproduction is strictly prohibited without an additional agreement. This includes reproduction by any means, be it electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise.

Works cited

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Kallmeyer, Hade. Lehrerin der harmonischen Gymnastik : ein neuer Frauenberuf. Berlin-Zehlendorf : Kulturverlag, 1912. Internet Archive, Internet Archive, http://archive.org/details/b28055044.

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