Centenary College's History Detailed in Campus History Series Book

Raymond Frey was tasked with writing the more than 140-year history of Centenary College in 18,000 words over 125 pages with 200 photographs.

"You know, they say a picture tells a thousand words," said Frey, a professor of history and historian at the Hackettstown college. "And when you only have 125 pages, they have to."

Known for its popular local and regional United States history books that tell stories with vintage photographs and captions, Arcadia Publishing's spinoff Campus History Series focuses on the history of college's across the country. The Centenary version was released on Sept. 24.

"I tried to pick people and places on campus that represented certain time periods," Frey said. "Some of the pictures that I couldn't use, it just broke my heart that I couldn't find a place for them."

He began with the founding of the college just a few years after the Civil War and ended with present day. After surviving a fire in 1899, Centenary evolved from a coeducational Methodist preparatory school and collegiate institute to an all-girls' school in 1910, later becoming a junior college for women in 1940 and four-year women's college in 1976.

Men returned to campus in 1988 as the college became northwestern New Jersey's only four-year coeducational institution. In the 1990s the college expanded with graduate and off-campus accelerated degree programs.

It took Frey about a year and a half to finish. He was writing day and night from January to March.

The library gave him his own key so he could let himself in over spring break.

"There was no one here," he said. "It was me, the boiler operator and a security guard."

He would sit in the college's archives surrounded by thousands of photographs. Because the photos were jammed in filing cabinets, he would skim through one cabinet at a time, with each holding 30 or 40 folders of photos and memorabilia.

He outlined the structure of the book on the wall and filled it in as he went along.

"I had to make a lot of hard choices," he said. "I had so many photographs and so many stories to tell that I couldn't tell because I didn't have the space."

He relied on Centenary's archivists for help.

"There were times when I think he wanted to find a picture that conveyed a certain part of the college experience," said archivist Colleen Bain.

View full sizePhoto courtesy of Centenary CollegeRaymond Frey
Frey said, "Sometimes I just needed somebody just to give me another eye to look for something."

Roger Anderson, chief operating officer at Centenary, was the only college representative to proof read the book before it went to the publisher.

"I think he did a really good job of telling a story and maintaining a theme throughout the book," he said.

"There hasn't been a history written of the college since 1947," Frey said. "I've been here over 20 years and a lot of the folks here don't really know the history or tradition of the college, so I thought this would be a really good time to bring that back."