Docent Dispatch The Folger Shakespeare Library December 2010 Ten Folger Surprises: The 2010 Hoitsma Lecture by Dr. Stephen Grant On October 14, 2010, Dr. Stephen Grant delivered the annual Hoitsma Lecture, named in honor of Muriel Hoitsma, an active docent of this institution in the early years of the docent program. Dr. Grant indicated, in his opening remarks that after a tour of the Library, he, as an Amherst graduate, and a biographer, was interested in finding out more about the Folgers. He was surprised to learn there was no book-length biography of the Folgers. After receiving permission to prepare such a biography, he began work. Dr. Grant's talk was entitled "Ten Folger Surprises." It was really a marvelous in-depth look at Henry and Emily Folger, throughout their lives. With apologies to Dr. Grant for a bit of rearrangement of his excellent presentation, here are the ten surprises (and an extra one or two). 1. Nantucket and the Folger family history. There have been Foulgers/Folgers on Nantucket Island for close to 350 years. The first, Peter Foulger, arrived from East Anglia in the 1660s. His daughter, Abiah, married Josiah Franklin, of Boston. Their son was Benjamin Franklin. Henry Folger, Sr. (the father of Henry, Jr., the founder of the Library), left Nantucket in 1849, along with his two brothers. Henry moved to New York and became a milliner. One of the other brothers, James, went west, to California. He didn't find gold, but he did establish Folger's Coffee Company and began to grind and package coffee. 2. Emily Jordan and the Jordan family history. Emily Jordan had one brother and two sisters. Her brother read law, and one of her sisters, Mary Augusta, graduated from Vassar and became a teacher and librarian there. In 1884, the recently founded Smith College recruited her, and she became a long-time and much beloved faculty member at Smith. Though she mainly taught Early English, her students said her class was "a class in Miss Jordan." Emily was born in Ohio, but after her father worked on the successful Lincoln presidential campaign, the family moved to Washington where he worked in the Lincoln Treasury Department. Though it is not known how long the Jordans lived in Washington, there is a short Table of Contents story in the Folger Collection by Emily, entitled The President and the Little Girl, in which a young girl meets the President. It is unclear how much of this story is truth, Hoitsma Lecture… pp. 1-3 and how much is fiction. Chair’s Letter p. 3 Jewel Box Moments.. 3. Emily's favorite professor. pp. 4-5 Henry VIII at The Folger pp. 5-6 Emily attended Vassar, and graduated in 1879. She was quite close to a very popular professor there, named Maria Mitchell. Mitchell was a professor of Some New Docent Class Projects Astronomy and often held "Under the Dome" dinner parties for some of the p. 6 students. She frequently wrote poems about the girls, alluding to their likes or Docent Inservice…. pp. 6- 7 dislikes or relating humorous events. Maria Mitchell lived on Nantucket Island and would have known the Folger family. 4. Henry's college activities and his nickname. Henry appeared in a production of Gilbert and Sullivan's "H.M.S. Pinafore" shortly after its introduction in the United States. He played the part of Dick Deadeye. That resulted in Emily's nickname for him of "Dick," though he was known by everyone else as "H.C." (or later, and by most people, "Mr. Folger"). He graduated from Amherst in 1879, and he took prizes for academic achievement. However, he missed out on the Shakespeare prize. Later, Emily would say that he started collecting Shakespeare out of pique for losing that prize, but other evidence reflects an active interest in Shakespeare before that time. 5. Standard Oil. Charles Pratt, Jr., was a fraternity brother of Henry Folger's at Amherst. His father, Charles Pratt, Sr., was an oil refiner in Brooklyn and on Long Island. In 1872, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company bought Pratt’s oil refining companies. When Henry graduated in 1879, he went to work for Pratt (and Rockefeller.) For the first couple of years, he worked as a statistical clerk during the day and attended Columbia Law School at night. He received a law degree from Columbia, but he never practiced law, and he never even joined the Standard Oil legal department. Instead, his facility with numbers made him an invaluable asset to Rockefeller. He developed an encyclopedic knowledge of the oil business and wrote histories of petroleum several times for Standard Oil. The "H.C. Folger," an oil tanker commissioned in 1916, saw trans- Atlantic service in World War I. Henry Folger worked for Standard Oil for 49 years. The desk he used at Standard Oil is the desk for the Director of the Folger, and it has been since 1956. 6. Golf. Henry played golf regularly with John D. Rockefeller. He also played golf with Emily. His code name for correspondence with British booksellers was "Golfer." 7. Emily's play diary. Emily attended many plays, some with Henry. She recorded her observations of 125 Shakespeare plays. The notes included information on the date and time of the production, the cast, whether understudies performed, the elocution, and her impressions (including comments of other patrons.) She also noted what the reviews had said, and she sometimes returned to see the play again to see if the criticisms in the reviews had been addressed. 8. Correspondence. An enormous amount of Folger correspondence survives. Lots of it deals with the mechanics of putting together the collection (estimated to be about 90,000 books, and many other items, by the time the Library opened.) Other correspondence deals with trips to the Homestead Resort in Southwest Virginia twice a year (he for golf, she primarily for the hot springs.) One letter contains a map with 4 possible locations for the Library. Those four are: the present location, the location of the Supreme Court, the location of the Florida House and the Lutheran Church, and the location of the Madison Building of the Library of Congress. 9. Money matters. The Folger archive contains 10,000 cancelled checks. Henry borrowed money frequently, and sometimes quite large sums. His lenders included banks, brokers, other Standard Oil executives and John D. Rockefeller himself. However, Henry always repaid on time, and with interest. Rockefeller considered his credit "as good as gold." 10. The Amherst trustees. Stanley King was a trustee of Amherst when Henry died. He had never met Henry Folger, and he learned of Henry's naming of Amherst as the administrator of the Library only by reading about it in The New York Times. In 1932, King became President of Amherst. He met with the architects and others involved in the construction of the Library, and with early staff. Dwight Morrow, who worked for J.P. Morgan, was Ambassador to Mexico, and was also the father-in-law of Charles Lindbergh, was the first Chair of the Folger Board. Ex-president Calvin Coolidge was the second. Chief Justice of the United States Harlan Fiske Stone was the third. 11. A little extra. Henry and Emily met after college in 1882 at the home of Lydia Pratt. Both were there at a salon, to read or recite Shakespeare. Henry bought up the 14 townhouses on the site of the Library through agents, over a 9 year period. The cost was $315,000. Henry died of an embolism in New York, following a surgical procedure in June, 1930. .