In March 2024 the St. Lawrence University Libraries Special Collections acquired a small musical program and accompanying letter. The letter is dated March 30th, 1882, is on Tiffany Company (New York New York) letterhead, and informs a “Miss Folsom” that they will print 100 programs for $30. The program is presumably a copy for Miss Folsom’s inspection. Nellie Elmina Folsom graduated from St. Lawrence in 1882. Nellie was from Hermon New York, and after graduation she held several teaching positions in New York State before making her way to the University of Chicago to earn a graduate degree in English Literature. From there, she made her way to England to study at the British Museum, before returning the United States and heading to South Dakota where she was on the faculty at South Dakota State University from 1887 to 1899. A “Class Souvenir” from 1898 at the Digital Library of South Dakota lists her on page four as a “Professor of English Literature,” and on page five she is pictured with the other members of the faculty. An article in South Dakota History states she taught American Literature, English Poets, as well as Latin, and gives an account of a student recalling her as “universally loved and admired by her students.”
In South Dakota she met and married Edgar Burnett. Not long after they married, they departed for Nebraska where Edgar Burnett had a long and distinguished career of service at the University of Nebraska, culminating with his appointment to be the Chancellor of the University, an office he held from 1927-1938. In 1934 Owen D. Young was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Nebraska. Nellie wrote then St Lawrence University President Richard Eddy Sykes about the visit, and we have his reply dated June 22nd 1934 which confirms that Young met with the Burnett’s while in Lincoln. The letter also confirms Nellie was in touch with members of the greater Laurentian community. We do not have many records of her returning to Canton from the Midwest—in 1930 Nellie and Edgar visited Canton and toured campus (an article in the Commercial Advertiser details their itinerary), and in 1932 The Ogdensburg Republican Journal published excerpts of a letter she wrote to commemorate her fiftieth reunion. In the letter she recounted social life on campus in the late nineteenth century and reveals the Beta Ball was an all-nighter. The program we acquired would have been for the senior class concert, and the Ogdensburg Daily Journal reported the concert a success and that “the hall was packed.” We now know Nellie was a part of commencement planning in her senior year, and these new documents are, other than two photographs and a listing in a commencement program, the only records we have of her days at St. Lawrence. There is record of her successful academic career, and that, as a single person fresh from the British Museum, ventured to read and teach in South Dakota two years before South Dakota was admitted to the Union. She was a person, it would seem, with a passion both for literature and adventure.