This Month's Featured Item from the Archive

Woodrow Wilson Scrapbook

Sir Orville Watson Mosher, Compiler

Circa 1909-1963

Click on pictures to magnify!

At the time of his death, Sir Orville Watson Mosher (1885-1971) was probably the only Kansan in history to have received the "medaille d'Honneur Academique avec le titre 'Chevalier Lancier d'Honneur" from the French academie - and it was ESU's President King who knighted Sir Orville!

Mosher, History faculty at the Kansas State Normal School (later the Kansas State Teachers College, and ultimately Emporia State University) and one of the principal founders of the Lyon County Historical Society, had lived in Emporia since 1929, but he had arrived here after having spent several years teaching in the United States and in France. Mosher graduated in 1909 from Princeton University, where he had studied jurisprudence under then Princeton-President Woodrow Wilson. He later completed a Law degree at Harvard, before earning his doctorate in History in France.

Throughout his life, Mosher collected his and his Princeton classmates' recollections of Woodrow Wilson, which he compiled into a scrapbook in the mid-1960s. Like most scrapbooks, Mosher's was made of acidic materials that did not stand the test of time. In order to preserve the contents of the scrapbook for the benefit of future generations of researchers, ESU Archives had the scrapbook professionally conserved between 2006 and 2009.

The "before" and "after" images of the scrapbook's treatment, above, reveal the drastic measures that were taken to stabilize the scrapbook, which is available now for researchers to use by appointment only.

Please contact ESU Archives at 620-341-6431 or archives@emporia.edu for more information or to schedule a research appointment.

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Last Updated October 6, 2009