[Williston burned down on Sat Dec 22, 1917, which helps to date this letter.]Friday night
Dear Dr. Clapp:-
Williston has been burned most a week - and we need you more every day! There are so many things to be decided - and decided fast. It's no joke at all. Now I always supposed the place would burn up - and I supposed we might not have a choice as to time - but to select the middle of a war-price winter seems to me about the limit - and to burn so fast! I wanted a slow fire with a chance to rescue our heirlooms. We miss those things that had associations more every day.
But we aren't mourning with tears and abandon - we're on the job all the time! Ann stayed until Tues. a.m. and is now looking up things in N.Y. Lu came Wed. night and is to stay through. I hope to get off Sun. noon to stay until Wed. night - and to see Dr. Sedgwick, Dr. Porter, Prof. Mead as well as some apparatus men, and to go to a Food Conference one day!
But I'm more and more sorry I hadn't more wits at the time of the fire. Lu might have had her desk & filing case and we might have had Gruebler stains - those things could have been done and I'm ashamed of not having done them. Your things I guess weren't possible, because the fire went so fast on that floor, and because I was alone where they could have been approached and I couldn't have broken in the doors. They were too heavy. There are a few charred, oh, awfully charred note books for you in Mr. Snow's office - all very pathetic. A man brought in one more today.
Well - I'd better tell you what we've done.
Sunday we wiped off the remains. There was snow on those in Porter. We also straightened out things in the two places where they had been taken, Porter front hall and 4 Mary Lyon, big old recitation room.
Monday we inventoried this salvage, and even that took time - to count everything. There was a conference, Miss Woolley, Mr. Adams, Miss Purington, Miss Greene, heads of dep'ts (Ann, Mr. Hayes, Mignon & I), Mr. Skinner a few minutes. It seems possible to get classrooms in odd places for us for the rest of this semester and in some cases longer. Miss Talbot goes to the library until there is a real new building. She has one room for specimens (which will be given!) one for recitations, a smaller work room. Mr. Hayes is to have the top floor of Skinner finished off either temporarily or permanently (I think it's not decided.). Miss Stokey telegraphed she could use the Plant House. She hasn't come yet - her stock is very low at present. How she can stay away I don't see. It's not convenient for the other folks. Ann gets the west half of Assembly Hall (next street) for her lab. for everything, with a classroom on third floor of Mary Lyon and one of the English offices. I have classes in the Art Building, probably, - and it just occurs to me they don't have a black board there, though they do have a reflectoscope - oh, well - I'll get one! No lab. the rest of this semester. We have 4 Mary Lyon for a junk room. We saved 26 microscopes (5 lost their oculars) a few models, a little physiological apparatus, quite a lot of dissecting instruments and that's all. It totals about $2000, and though there is some damage we rejoice in everything saved, since it is so hard to buy now. There isn't enough of anything to do a job with a class, but it will all help. It's all in 4 Mary Lyon and there's much extra room too! My desk & records are out and are no end useful even if the desk is all smashed.
At first Miss Woolley and Miss Purington thought we ought to get squeezed in somewhere until a real lab. came, but then there was the idea of perching a temporary building on the old foundations. We'll have to be years without a good lab, probably, and we have a duty to present our sciences adequately. Also, nobody, - wants us! We have too many fire hazards and smells! So the idea of a temporary building grew.
Wednesday, no Tuesday, I kept on listing the things saved and looking up values - and of course there were interruptions no end. Wednesday Mr. Adams said we had to have the detailed inventory for the insurance adjustors, all that on which our 1916 valuation was based, so I got two people making copies (for the original got saved). Insurance men came Thurs. and I had my salvage list ready, and Miss Talbot had reconstructed her inventory from memory and reference to the Amherst men. She has been first rate, and everyone feared she'd go to pieces. Everything gone. It's pathetic to see her hunt for Podokesaurus! Ellen Bliss thinks this may give her the jolt she needs to make her get on the job. Mr. Adams got good luck with insurance - total on building - 58,000 I believe - and about 40,000 on contents (?).
This morning the men got at the ruins and took out what there was. The floor didn't fall in the old 1st floor library so Lu's kitchen was undisturbed. The fire seems to have started from crossed wires (?) just by top of basement stairway on main floor, back hall. There were wires in abundance under the floor there - for dark-room &c &c. Everyone agrees that the main floor north hall was first in flames. I saw it working down the banisters and the men who tried to put it out saw where it had most headway. But 'twas so fast - nobody ever got into any floor of the annex to save a thing. Of course they watered it well, and really put out the fire heading toward the kitchen. Things were all frozen, but Lu got a lot, mostly good glassware. In your old office one of my closets had some kitchen dishes and some towels. A few catboards can be refinished. Oh yes, a few chalk boxes, one with some old keys in it - to Leitz microscope cases &c. Which reminds me - no microscope kept its key except those tied on firmly. But think of saving kitchen dishes and losing our best glassware!
Oh - joke! There's a doorway in the foundation back of the old waste barrel closet - where you always wanted one cut. It's there large as life and always was. It was only a think partition back of the closet.
I sent you two pictures of the ruins. They're quite picturesque. Today the Ranger men - his wrecking crew - were planning to pull the middle front wall over back. The keystone is out of the arch above those old colored windows and the thing is some tilted, as are the chimneys, but we've played around there a good deal. Today they planned to save the whole west wall up one story and build wood from that back. I've made 'em plans showing how Ann and I need one floor and basement, with a little allowance for Stokey though she may not want it - in which case Ann can use it for a museum.
Jane Carpenter sent 10.00 right off. Isn't that like her?
Fine letter from Sedgwick. Cordial offers from Amherst College, Mass. Ag., Wellesley. Folks are very nice, but we want at least 250,000 and then maybe we can't build! The war is taking all structural steel.
Ann lost lots - everything she had over there - and that even meant some clothes! Lu lost her research stuff all of it. Did Miss Wallace have much? Alice Noyes' research was here too. It's pretty bad. I lost little comparatively, partly because I've done so little - but I didn't save much of my own save a few kyneograph [sic] records. All the slides went - everybody's - except a half dozen boxes on Mary Oliver's desk. All my films are gone, all my notebooks, oh, lots of things not of vital importance - such as 50 glasses and little cans of stuff for my mother to eat, what I put up last summer and hadn't brought down here. Emma's snowshoes are gone. But my loss is nothing to yours. I keep thinking of your beloved things - things I cared about only a little less than you did - Miss Shattuck's notebook, Adele Field's picture, all the Woods Hole things, Penikese - oh, so many others. Dr. Porter writes, "You may have a finer laboratory but it will be poor in associations" - he liked our lab. I knew it - he felt that atmosphere you gave it. Oh - come back as soon as we have a place and bless it for us.
At one time Ranger said we could be in Feb. 1, but he admits this clearing is bad. You see it's frozen solid. They'll have to use pickaxes on the bricks, which is different from just picking them up of [sic] a summer day. And we're in for a real cold wave, the paper says. Below zero at this minute.
I just don't know what'll happen. I can't give up lab. the 2nd sem. without a struggle - but you know the campus isn't full of labs. Everybody else has some space, but whether I can find any I don't know. It looks dubious. I'm perfectly ready to work, and to fight for existence - I'll have to, for when the inventory was made we were just dividing the stuff and so I'll have little insurance money to spend - but there'll be a little, and I've begun that way before, and can again. Things grow - but they must have a little space and I'm truly dubious about the clearing of that place until the frost lets go. The stuff is easy ten feet deep - bricks, ice, charred timbers all through much of the basement. Some places not so bad where a wall fell out for a bit, and getting the walls down isn't so easy. And the new semester begins anon. But the girls will be good, and we may be able to manage some lab. work. I'll try to invent things that don't require apparatus!
Miss Safford came back tonight. She's been away ten days. My mother's companion is always away when anything happens. Some days my mother hasn't had much care. She'll be happier now. She's so used to attentions that it's hard for her, even if not really risky, to be without constant help.
Goodnight - and we'll do the best we can - partly because we have to, but quite a bit because you would if you were here.
And love to you. Thanks from my mother for the card - The one you sent me is lovely -