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(CONNECTICUT.) Pictorial autograph book of the Yale Class of 1853. Approximately 127 plates, interspersed with blank leaves and 112 leaves of manuscript inscriptions. 4to, modern buckram with original gilt pictorial backstrip and cover illustrations attractively laid down, personalized to class member Edward W. Seymour, tape remnants and library numbers on backstrip; minor foxing to plates. New Haven, CT, 1853
This yearbook album was produced during a brief period from 1852 to 1855 when Yale students had lithograph portraits made, wrote out personalized album inscriptions for their classmates, and then the whole was collated and bound for each student. Later class albums featured photographs. The plates here include an illustrated title page, 7 Yale views, an Undine club list, 14 lithograph portraits of faculty members, 102 of classmates, 4 depicting the gravestones of deceased class members, plus a lone 3-inch salt print photograph of John H. Barrett.
This was the personal copy of Edward Woodruff Seymour (1832-1893), who became a Connecticut lawyer and state Supreme Court justice. Notable among the inscribers are Yale president Theodore Woolsey, and two future presidents (Noah Porter and Timothy Dwight V). Classmates who signed include the Hawaiian missionary and author Hiram Bingham II (who recalled skipping a Beethoven rehearsal to go sailing); Supreme Court justice George Shiras Jr.; and Cornell's founding president Andrew D. White. At least two of them, Captain Benjamin F. Baer and General Edward Harland, were later Union officers in the Civil War. One classmate who is illustrated but did not sign was Randall Lee Gibson of Louisiana, who later became a Confederate general and longtime congressman; his great-great-grandfather had been a free Black man in Virginia, but Gibson lived his life as white.
