Established 1826 — Oldest College Newspaper West of the Alleghenies

Letter to the Editor | Miami should respect its valuable history

Photo by James Steinbauer, Editorial Editor

If you plan to leave Oxford for the summer, first take a stroll across Patterson Avenue from the Center for Performing Arts and pay a visit to the Patterson Place Museum. Walk through the old stone columns leading up to the building and admire the ambience of the place. Notice the plaque on one column designating the space as a site on the old campus of the Western College for Women, an independent college from 1853-1974. If you return to Miami in the fall, this historic place may no longer be there. Rumor has it that there is interest in demolishing the building to make way for dormitory construction.

Just south of Patterson Place is a building known as the Edgar Stillman Kelley cottage. The Western College class of 1916 gave funds for the building of that structure as the home and studio for America's first artist-in-residence on a college campus. There was another rumor this spring that the Kelley cottage might also be demolished in order to make way for dormitory construction. However, for the present time the cottage seems to have been spared that fate.

One would wish for a more sensitive handling of valuable landmarks that educate us about our past. We should be proud to have such landmarks in our midst, instead of showing disrespect by erasing them, as if they never existed. The Western College for Women was one of the oldest of its kind in the United States, representing a high regard for women's education prior to the advent of co-educational institutions. Many women who had to fight for equal rights in this country gained inspiration from leaders at institutions like our own Western College. Women of today would do well to stand up for the right to have their past held in respect.

Farewell, then, to a venerable place that might have lived on as an icon illustrating the journey of higher education in America. It will be a loss of heritage, like losing a library of memories.

Josette Stanley

jerryjosette@gmail.com