…Just before we came away Varina [Brown, ’89], and Corinne Keen [’89] had a duel. These little affairs are becoming quite the fashion of late at the College. Corinne and Varina were both nominated Vice President of Alpha. Varina was elected and Corinne challenged her to a duel, and asked me to be her second. We had a great time. I sent a challenge to Brown (as we called V) and she chose Louise Poppenheim [’89], as her second. Pop— then in writing accepted the challenge and signed himself Louis P—. The weapons, he stated, were to be Blanchon pistols (in other words toy pop guns – the corks when they fly out make a very loud report)… (p. 1-2)
We’re busy making a new collection available in our digital library: the Student Letters Collection. This collection features 874 digitized letters (with over 5,000 pages!) from nineteenth-century Vassar students, providing amazing access to the events, experiences, and everyday lives of the people that shaped the early years of the College. As we were working, one particular letter stood out for its description of a very out-of-the-ordinary event sometime after June 10, 1888: a duel.
Establishing the terms of the duel in June 1888
Edith Banfield (VC 1892) wrote a letter home to her family in June 1888 describing the duel-ready situation that emerged at the end of that semester (above). In her writing, she discusses the formality around setting the terms of the duel, including the location (a “shady nook behind the music hall”), the weapons (pop guns), and distance (six paces). The letter also contains correspondence between Brown and Keen and their “seconds,” beginning on page 7 of the digital copy. While the duel had a winner and loser, of course, there were no injuries, just shrieks of laughter and mock sobbing, Banfield reported. As she gleefully exclaimed, “I never had more fun in my life!”
Read the letter and view the emerging digital collection through this Gargoyle Bulletin sneak preview!
The Student Letters digital collection is part of a much larger collection of student materials available in our Archives and Special Collections Library. For more information about this extensive group of materials and to see a list of items available in the archives, including names of students and graduation dates, view the online Guide to the Student Materials Collection.
Thanks for commenting! The Poppenheims are well known to us here in the College Archives. We refer researchers looking into life at the college in the 1880s to the Johnson book, but we turn to it most often when someone has an interest in what it was like to be a Southerner in the North just as the Civil War was ending. Can you imagine? Actually, that would make a great blog post! We’ll have to put that on our list of possible topics.
Thanks again for being in touch,
Laura Streett
College Archivist
Louisa Poppenheim was my great aunt. She and her three sisters all attended Vassar in the 1880s. My great grandmother Mary Poppenheim read about Vassar in the 1860s and vowed then that if she had any girls, she would send them all there. As far as I know, she is the only woman in the history of Vassar to have had four daughters graduate from there! See the book “Southern Women at Vassar, the Poppenheim Letters,” ed. Joan-Marie Johnson, U. of SC Press, 2002.