Three days after America lost JFK to an assassination, Hillsdale College lost its first historian and many archives to a house fire.
“We had just about come to the terrible truth that a president of the United States could be assassinated in our time,” the college’s 1964 President’s Report said. Soon after, a “ tragic fire took the life of our college historian and professor, Vivian Lyon Moore — ‘Frau Moore,’ as she was fondly called by thousands of our alumni.”
Coupled with the tragedy of Moore’s death was the concern over losing mounds of college documents she kept in her bedroom.
“In that total and consuming fire also went literally scores — perhaps hundreds — of early and most precious official and historical documents and papers of Hillsdale College,” Hillsdale’s March 1, 1964 Alumni Magazine said. “Efforts were made to rescue or salvage the more important papers but practically nothing could be recognized let alone restored.”
“Even when I began at Hillsdale, many said ‘we don’t have a lot left,’” said Arlan Gilbert, former Hillsdale professor and now college historian.
“We don’t know what all was kept in her house, so we can’t know what all we lost,” Mossey Public Service Librarian Linda Moore said. “We’ve had many defining fires in Hillsdale’s history and it’s hard to know what we lost in each of them. That’s why we don’t allow candles any more.”
The Collegian reported on Dec. 5, 1963 that Moore died “in a fire that gutted her home at 25 S. Broad St.” from “smoke asphyxiation.”
The obituary said Moore began teaching at Hillsdale in 1909 as a piano instructor and German professor. She left in 1914 to work at several other institutions including: University of Chicago, University of Michigan, and Notre Dame. Moore returned to Hillsdale in 1942 and she earned a position as an assistant professor of history, English, and German.
While living in Hillsdale, her interest in compiling genealogies led her to save many documents about the happenings in the city and college, according to Gilbert.
“She was the first person to have an interest in the local history,” Gilbert said. “Without her, we would have a lost a lot of the details and data.”
Using these detailed records of the college’s inner workings, Moore wrote her history book: “First Hundred Years of Hillsdale College,” for the college’s 100-year anniversary.
“She was a heavy smoker, though, and she took a lot of papers into her room, so when the house burned, we lost a lot of college papers,” Gilbert said.
Until recently, many mourned Hillsdale losing much of its early history to the ash heaps of that Nov. 25 fire. The concern was so great that the alumni magazine asked readers to send in any documents, photographs, or papers pertaining to the college that could be used to build its archives back up.
After spending much of his retirement from teaching researching the college’s history, Gilbert believes the loss incurred from the fire is exaggerated.
“I don’t think the fire was the tragedy we thought it was,” he said.
First, Gilbert said not all of the documents kept at Moore’s house burned. Either before or after the fire, many of the papers pertaining to the college were give to the University of Michigan’s Bentley Library, where they can still be found. Also, Gilbert said Moore made duplicates of many of her papers, so there’s a good chance many of the burnt files were not the only copies.
Second, Gilbert said most of the documents she collected pertained to specific organizations, clubs, or events — they did not portray Hillsdale’s importance in the national perspective. Many of the documents lending evidence to the college’s admirable reputation are found in other libraries and historical societies across America, where Gilbert found them to write his volumes of college history.
Third, the anxiety from thinking that so many important archives were lost spurred a renewed interest in collecting and saving college documents.
“It was a critical fire, but we have more than recovered,” Gilbert said. “We haven’t lost everything by any means.”