posted by Tim Golden

on July 19, 2006

Over the last week or so I've found a lot of great stuff at the HSP. Yesterday I was looking through a scrapbook in the "Family Service of Philadelphia Records", which was basically a scrapbook about the College Settlement of Philadelphia and the College Settlement movement from 1894-1900 and found lots of great newspaper articles, flyers about events, and essays. One particular article that stuck out was an article titled "Enjoyed the Music" with the subtitle "an audience of whites and blacks, children and adults - good work accomplished in the summer by the settlement". There was no date on the article, but it refers to St. Mary's street, so it was probably right around 1895. This article, and the scrapbook in general, answered some of the questions I had about entertainment in the 7th ward around 1900. I found out that both blacks and Russian Jews were at this particular performance, many of the blacks danced during the waltzes, the CSA was hosting a dance/supper afterwards for their youth groups and that free concerts would be happening every Wednesday night from 7-9pm. I also found out the a CSA youth group was arranging a performance of the opera "Pinafore", there was a Junior Settlement baseball team, and every week the CSA sent 10 kids to a country house in Rosedale, near Kennett Square, as a getaway type of thing.

In other parts of the scrapbook I found flyers about musical performances, free lectures, open classes (for a small fee), and club meeting times. One flyer advertised the opera "Indiana" (by Audran), which was to be performed at the Walnut St Theater on Tuesday May 28th 1895. This was a benefit to the CSA held by the Philadelphia Music Club and was open to all. I had been investigating things like opera, theater, and music, and found it all in one with this flyer in the scrapbook. I also found lots of other theater posters in Frank Dumont's minstrelsy scrapbook. Dumont bought the 11th St Theater in 1895, but had lots of posters from performances from the early 1880s. These posters were huge, attention grabbing, and fairly descriptive of the performances, but a lot of them did not have dates. One of the featured acts included a character called "a Lombard St belle" and another act was called the "Jaybird's Excursion" and was about a black family's trip to the Jersey shore.

I found a lot of other stuff too, but won't go into describing it: minutes from CSA meetings that mention Du Bois, articles and editorials about a series of lectures corresponding to the release of Du Bois' book, two essays by James S. Stemons (still haven't found the box I was looking for) about industrial rights for blacks in the North (similar to what Du Bois talks about) and some information about his newspaper "the Pilot", and a poem to O.V Catto that was read to students (I think) at the Institue for Colored Youth after his death.