Vassar Quarterly - Fall 2017 - 30

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Top: Seniors gather for a birthday celebration in what is now the Villard Room in Main.
Bottom: One of the boat clubs referred to by Annie Glidden, on Vassar lake.

daughters to Europe to be trained up," says Johnson. "It was the increasingly
affluent and able middle class who were probably more inclined toward this kind
of experiment."
Take Sarah Glazier, class of 1868-her father sold groceries in Hartford, CT, and
then rapidly expanded his business to include a wholesale operation and some
other businesses. Glidden's father is listed in the 1860 census as a manufacturer.
The father of Mary Reybold, also class of '68, started out as a farmer in Delaware
and eventually became the president of his own steamship company.
"These are people who were a lot like Matthew Vassar," says Brown. "They tend
to be people who have built their own fortunes rather than inherited them. They
tend to be Protestant. They are all white. They are only a couple of generations
removed from the Revolution. Almost all the ones I've looked at have ancestors
who fought in the Revolution. Many had ancestors who arrived on the Mayflower
or shortly thereafter."
And many of them died young. "Childbirth was often the cause," says Brown.
"Also illnesses and accidents were more likely to be fatal in those days because of
the lack of medical knowledge."
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Mary Reybold, for example, was one of the six
students known as "the hexagon." They studied
with Maria Mitchell for all three years of their Vassar
careers and later traveled with Mitchell to Iowa in
1869 to observe and record the solar eclipse. After
graduation, Reybold returned home to Delaware City,
married a physician, Dr. Stiles Kennedy, in 1872, and
bore three children. A few days after the birth of her
last child, on March 22, 1878, Mary Reybold Kennedy
died, undoubtedly of complications from childbirth.
She was the fifth member of the class of '68, which
numbered 25, to die within a decade of graduation.
Another member of the hexagon, Sarah Louise
Blatchley '68, to whom we owe the symbolic interpretation of the college colors, rose and grey, died in 1873
after a prolonged illness described by her classmate
Sarah Glazier as "a severe congestion of the lungs,
resulting in a cough"-probably tuberculosis. She
became ill in 1870, but in her letters to Glazier over the
next few years described herself as becoming stronger.
She wrote to Glazier from Savannah, GA, in 1871, then
from Florida in the spring of '72, and from a steamer
in the Atlantic Ocean in October of that same year en
route to San Diego, CA, where she finally succumbed.
Why these long journeys so far from her family in
Connecticut? "We don't know," says Brown, "but
there's always a reason. Medical treatment, maybe?
A relationship?"
As with most kinds of research, genealogical
research tends to open up at least as many questions
as it answers. "All of these questions are open ended,"
says Brown. "You go down the rabbit hole, and you
don't know what you're going to find. But what happens
is that these people become real. At least that's what
we're hoping. These were real women who led
interesting lives and made tough choices and whose
families had their own dramas. And sometimes their
stories are really sad."
So what do we know about Annie Glidden of
baseball fame?
She was born and grew up in and around Portsmouth, OH. By the time she arrived at Vassar in 1865,
she was an orphan. Her mother died when she was 10,
her father when she was 15. They left her and her two
brothers, John and Carlos, well off. Her father's real
estate holdings are listed in the 1860 census as worth
$230,000-over six million in today's dollars.
We have quite a few of her letters-mostly to her
brother John, to whom she was quite close-in the
Vassar College Digital Library. The letters give a
wonderful sense of what life at Vassar was like-
drama productions, baseball (of course), Founder's
Day, lectures and laboratories, sermons that moved
her, her classmates, their illnesses, the views from

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Vassar Quarterly - Fall 2017