Readers of Fit To Print know of the Newspaper Project’s growing enthusiasm for preservation microfilming and archiving college as well as some high school student papers. See, for example, the blog entry of last September 10, describing John Marshall High School’s The Monocle. Our latest filming initiative in this category is also, like The Monocle, from Richmond. This time however, the paper originates not from a public, but a private institution-St. Catherine’s School, the longest standing all girls school in the city and a school of equally long-standing high reputation.
Here are some sample images from this new holding:
In 1940 it was decided that the title The Scrap Basket on the masthead was a little too divorced from the pride and aspirations of the students responsible for the paper’s content.
A poll was conducted of the upper students and the resulting choice, The Arcadian, was inspired by an architectural feature of the campus-its two distinctive arcades. An article from the second page of the May, 1940 issue shown above speaks to the increased ambitions of the student staff.
Cost considerations during the war years shifted The Arcadian from the print shop to the mimeograph machine and a more homemade layout. An example can be seen below, as well as a 1944 cartoon illustrating St. Catherine’s extracurricular calendar.
St. Catherine’s is a “prep” school, after all, whose academic rigor is designed to produce the qualifications for that consequential next advance in a young woman’s education. From the close of the academic year 1994, a springtime perennial of The Arcadian:
