By Doug Hopkins, Esq., SEM history teacher
Appears in SEM Today, annual alumnae magazine
“It was one of those dreamy, hazy days in mid-summer, when the atmosphere had grown denser and more suffocating until dark clouds gathering in the sky told of a coming storm.”
So began Lillie Powell’s whimsical story, “The Golden Treasure at the End of the Bow,” which Mark Twain judged as one of two winners of the Buffalo Female Academy’s annual prize essay contest in 1870. Miss Powell’s story won top honors for the graduating class and Lillie Kelsey’s “Little Fish” won the prize for what was known as the “Collegiate Department.”
SEM’s archives closet recently yielded treasures: the original, winning, exquisitely hand-written essays in pencil, contained in a bound volume of 1870 essays by Buffalo Female Academy students. (We became Buffalo Seminary in 1889.)
I found these original documents on a hunch after learning of Twain and the writing contest from former SEM teacher Harry Schooley’s lecture notes, “A Short History of Buffalo Seminary.” It was a thrill to discover possibly the very pieces of paper that Mark Twain had held and read in May or June of 1870.
Mark Twain? Yes, Mark Twain! SEM lore has it that headmaster Albert Chester invited rival celebrity Buffalo journalists and friends, Twain of the Buffalo Express, and David Gray of the Buffalo Daily Courier, to judge the 1870 writing contest. Twain wrote a brief
“Report to the Buffalo Female Academy,” tactfully critiquing and praising the pool of entries and explaining their choices of winners. Gray read the report aloud, as well as the winning essays, at the June 23 graduation ceremony and the Buffalo Express published the report in full on June 24, 1870.
Twain’s “Report to the Buffalo Female Academy,” less than 10 short pages, makes a good read. It was re-published in 1961 in Mark Twain on the Art of Writing, edited by Martin B. Fried.
Twain seemed to be looking for simplicity of expression and lack of pretension. He praised Lillie Powell’s, “The Golden Treasure at the End of the Bow,” for “the very rare merit of stopping when it is finished,” and for its “freedom from adjectives and superlatives which is attractive, not to say seductive.”
Mark Twain described Lillie Kelsey’s “A Little Fish” as “nothing in the world but just a bright and fresh bit of fancy, told with a breezy dash, and with nothing grand or overpowering about it.” It tells the story of a small fish discovered by the author in a pitcher of drinking water. The narrator finds that the fish exists in a complex world, a sort of fish kingdom. Miss Kelsey begins to make out the conversations among fishes and a mystery and brewing tragedy draw her in. At the end of the story the narrator agonizes about how to help the little fish, who has been kidnapped and taken away by a group of bad fish. Suddenly, the narrator hears someone in the “real” world call herand she steps away. Returning momentarily to the room she finds the pitcher empty, the fish gone. She concludes , “. . . if I had spent less time in thinking of him and more in helping him, it would have been better for the fish and just as well for me.” Twain praised the abrupt ending to this essay, including the moral-to-the-story, “inevitable,” but effectively conveyed in this case because “it is compressed into a single sentence, and it is delivered with a snap that is exhilarating and an unexpectedness that is captivating.”
In his recently published book, Scribblin’ for a Livin’: Mark Twain’s Pivotal Period in Buffalo, Thomas Reigstad writes of the Buffalo Female Academy’s essay contest. Reigstad finishes with a summary of Twain’s rant, “against the traditional, formulas-driven method of teaching writing in American schools” and his praise for the Buffalo Female Academy and its forward thinking.
"To the high credit of the principal and teachers of this Academy (now SEM), it can be said that they are faithfully doing what they can to destroy it (see the "rant" above) and its influence and occupy their place with something new and better.
But when we of the committee [meaning himself and Gray] take into consideration that much of the atmosphere of old custom and tradition necessarily lingers around this unquestionably excellent Female Academy, we feel that we are more than complimentary when we say that the compositions we have been examining average well indeed."
These certainly sound like the aspirations of SEM writers and teachers today, 144 years later!
