I usually write about my community for my Friday newsletters; however, the 1950 US Federal Census is on my mind, so I’m going to write about what that census reveals about The College of William and Mary – the main draw that leads people to retire to Williamsburg. Full disclosure (although this is not news to anyone who knows me): I attended William and Mary from 1965 to 1969, graduating with a degree in Economics. It’s where I met Tim, and it has been an important part of our lives throughout our marriage. We moved to Williamsburg in 1998 and have loved living here ever since.
So my first challenge was to figure out how to access this census. I have an Ancestry account, so that’s not a problem. There is probably another way to do this, but I decided to look up the census information on the person who was President of the college at that time so I would be on the correct page of the census. I didn’t know who that was, so I googled it and found that the President was a man named John Edward Pumphret. I had never heard of him, but I couldn’t think of any reason why I would have known his name.
I put his name in the census search engine in Ancestry, and he popped up in the right location in Williamsburg. Looking around on the page where he was listed, I encountered the students who lived in the dorms on the main campus of William and Mary.
This snip shows the 1950 census entry for John E. Pomfret and his wife Sara:
You can see that the census enumerator was a little confused when he recorded this information. She crossed out and changed some of the information in various places on this form. We can determine a couple of interesting things, however. President Pomfret (age 51) was born in Pennsylvania and his wife Sarah (age 44) was born in South Carolina. He says he worked 70 hours in the previous week.
The items above the Pomfret entry are interesting as well. It looks like several members of the faculty – in the Business, English, and Spanish departments – are identified as “lodgers” living near the President’s house. I’m not sure where they lived, but it may have been in The Brafferton (right across the Wren Yard). They seem to have been hard workers – they all note that they worked 60 hours in the previous week. Charles Quittmeyer, the name above John Pomfret, was still on the faculty of the Business department when we were at school in the late 1960s. Tim says he remembers him but didn’t like him very much. His recollection was that he was “really old.” Assuming Tim took a class from him in 1968, Professor Quittmeyer was 50 years old.
You’ll also see from the snip above that John Pomfret’s name is on a “Sample Line” for this page of the census. That means he was asked additional questions by the census taker. I could see at the bottom of the page that his father was born in England and his mother in the US. He indicates that he completed seven years of college. Fair enough. He says he worked 52 weeks in the previous year for a salary of $10,000. This doesn’t seem like a lot of money; as I wrote yesterday, my father made $4,000 as a government clerk in the same year.
At the bottom of this census page, you see that the last two lines document Monroe Hall. That is the boys’ dorm nearest the Wren Building on the drawing above. For those of you familiar with Williamsburg, that is the Richmond Road side of the campus. I was confused at first because the first name listed is Edith L. Ficklin. What was she doing living in a boys’ dorm? Then I saw that she was a 63-year-old Widow, working as a Chaperone in the dorm. You’ll also note that she claimed that she worked 144 hours the previous week. There are only 168 hours in a week. She claimed she worked more than 20 hours a day. Busy woman.
The next several pages of the census record identify all of the boys living in Monroe Hall at the time the census was taken:
On closer examination, there’s something odd going on with these names – they appear in alphabetical order. Unless the boys were housed alphabetically (unlikely), the enumerator (Leonard Legum for this side of the campus) got these names from a central location – possibly the Chaperone. He may have made up the room numbers. The next 15 pages document the boys living in Monroe and Old Dominion dorms. Leonard Legum identified the buildings by name, listed the boys alphabetically, and again showed the room numbers. Old Dominion Hall also had a Chaperone, Emma Larimore, a 70-year-old widow from Tennessee.
One part of the census form asks if the respondent worked during the preceding year. It looks like about 10% of the boys held part-time jobs; the most common job was “waiter.”
The 13 pages of this census record preceding the John E. Pomfret entry show the girls living in the dorms on the Jamestown Road side of the Campus. The first thing I noted was that a higher percentage of the girls were from Virginia than I had observed for the boys. This was possibly because William and Mary was the only state coed school – The University of Virginia and the Virginia Polytechnical University (VPI, or what we now call Virginia Tech) didn’t admit women until the 1970s. The girls’ schools in Virginia – Mary Washington, Radford, Longwood, James Madison – had their origins as “normal” schools or teachers’ colleges, and didn’t have the kind of academic reputation or graduate programs that William and Mary had.
A different census enumerator, Barbara K. Jones, collected the information from the girls’ dorms. She didn’t provide the name of the buildings or the room numbers, but did identify the buildings as Building 1, 2, and 3. Building 1 had a housemother named Emily Lowery, a 60-year-old widow from Ireland. Building 2 had a housemother named Frances Campbell, a 71-year-old widow from England. Because she appears on a “Sample Line” on the census page, we have additional information about her. Her father was born in Scotland and her mother was born in England. She indicated that she worked 52 weeks in the previous year for a salary of $1,020. She also made $1,125 from “other sources” – probably a pension or inheritance of some sort. Building 3 had two housemothers; Alma D. Newbury, a 45-year-old widow from Virginia, and Edith Brinton, a 70-year-old widow from New York.
About 10% of the girls had part-time jobs as well. Most of these jobs were on campus, typing or performing other secretarial jobs for the academic departments of the college.
When we started college there in 1965, the girls’ dorms still had housemothers. The housemother for my freshman year dorm was a woman named Mrs. Montgomery. She was from South Africa and was older than dirt. She was a hateful woman. We put Vaseline on the inner doorknob of her room one day so she couldn’t get out. She had to take the hinges off the door. She used to stalk through the lobby to enforce the “three-leg” rule: if you were sitting in the lobby with your boyfriend, you had to have three legs on the floor. This was before coed dorms or even open visitation in the dorms. If a male was on the upper floors of the dorm, the first girl to spot him was supposed to yell “Man on the hall” so the rest of us would close our doors and avoid running around in our skivvies.
The boy’s dorms no longer had housemothers by that time. The fraternity and sorority houses still had housemothers in 1969, when we graduated.
What a fascinating post. I love that the college is so old. Boy - everyone worked long hours then didn't they? The terminology is interesting. President. I don't know what they call them here. I'm thinking Dean. Looking at University of Queensland colleges it seems to be Head or Principal - Warden in one which I think sounds a bit grim. Dad's old college at Sydney Uni, Wesley, has a Master.
Great piece! I love the 1920's drawing of the campus. At St. Mary's College of Maryland at the same time as your were here, we had both the Dean of Women and the Housemother living in our dorm, Queen Anne Hall. The president of the school was May Russell, a woman I knew, admired and loved. The '60's were very hard on her.