A Medieval

Dedication

The dramatic ceremony that formally dedicated Alumnae House and all of its treasures to Vassar was one for the ages—the Middle Ages, that is. The year was 1924, but no short skirts were swinging or jazz music playing on Sunday, June 8. Instead, robed figures proceeded grandly to the sound of heraldic trumpets by torchlight.

Like many details of the Alumnae House interior, the dedication ceremony was conceived by Violet Oakley—the artist who created the centerpiece of the living room, The Great Wonder triptych. As with the triptych itself, Oakley worked with Louise Meigs, class of 1891, who headed the Alumnae House Opening Committee and who had commissioned The Great Wonder to honor her deceased Vassar roommate, Hester Oakley Ward, class of 1891, Violet Oakley’s sister.

The ceremony began in the living room with the singing of a Shakespearean house blessing:

Strew good luck,
friends, on every sacred room,
That it may stand till the perpetual doom,
In state as wholesome as in state ’tis fit.
Worthy the owners and the owners it.

Then through an aisle marked off by brightly costumed guards came the procession led by four “Gloria Trumpeters” and two torchbearers who lit the fireplace and the candelabras standing before the closed triptych. A “Chronicler,” Sydney Thompson, class of 1912, read a poem written for the occasion by Carolyn Wilson Link, class of 1917. Adelaide Hooker, class of 1925 and daughter of major Alumnae House donor Blanche Ferry Hooker, class of 1894, placed the decorative Deed of Gift for the House at the feet of a berobed President Henry Noble MacCracken. Elizabeth Coonley, class of 1924, the daughter of the other major donor, Queene Ferry Coonley, class of 1896, presented the Scroll of Gifts. Finally, Louise Meigs’s daughter Hester Oakley Meigs, class of 1927, presented two keys—one symbolic of the outer door of the House and another that she used to unlock the closed triptych.

As Violet Oakley described it in a letter she wrote shortly after the occasion, “Little Hester … reached up and unlocked the great, gold Doors—unfolding them reverently, and stepping down and back with her arms still unconsciously outstretched—coming to Earth, as it were, as a bird quietly descends.”

The audience gasped.

The ceremony concluded with a dedication song written by Elizabeth Coonley and Adelaide Hooker:

This day have fires been lighted
That never burned before.
And halls are thronged to-day that shall
Be silent nevermore.
Then come, good people, gather ye,
And dedicate this house to be,
For shelter and for unity,
From now for ever more.

The writer covering the event for the Vassar Alumnae Magazine found herself somewhat at a loss to capture it all, writing, “The spirit that has gone into the building and equipment of Alumnae House was so perfectly and so beautifully expressed in the dedication ceremony … that those of us who were present find ourselves longing for some way of reproducing that ceremony in its entirety—music, color, design, and words—for the sake of the many who could not attend. That is impossible.” In other words, you just had to be there!