June 12, 1900

Attendance at Class Day, held out of doors at the rear of Raymond House on a perfect June day, was the largest in Vassar history. Marching 1,000 yards along a path marked out in white muslin, the juniors led with the traditional daisy chain, followed by the seniors.

Class president Alice Prentice Barrows ’00 welcomed the attendees, and Eunice Oberly ’00 and Vilda Sauvage ’00 told the class history. The interlude between the two parts of the history was filled by Eleanor Kenrick Samson ’00, who sang Bernborg’s “Nymphs and Fawns.” Moving to the class tree, the seniors buried their class records beneath the tree and, giving the senior charge, Maude Louise Ray ’00 passed Matthew Vassar’s spade to Annie Maria Crater ’01, who gave the junior response.

At the meeting of the board of trustees, Edward S. Atwater was elected to succeed the late Cyrus Swan, a charter trustee and close confidant of the Founder. Lewis Pilcher was appointed instructor in art, succeeding Henry Van Ingen, Vassar’s original professor of art, who died in 1898. A former lecturer in architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, Pilcher was later the architect of Jewett House and the Good Fellowship House at Vassar, and subsequently, as New York State Architect, the architect of the “new” Sing Sing prison (1919). In his later years, he founded of the School of Architecture at Pennsylvania State University.

At a new Class Day event, the Phi Beta Kappa lecture, Professor Franklin Giddings of Columbia interpreted the granting of Mu chapter as evidence that the last discrimination by sex in education had been removed. Women’s clubs were no longer needed, he told the class and their guests, and he advised the graduates not to squander their time with them or with other such organizations.

—The New York Times