In the basement of the school sits an old costume of Cyrus the Bear, with a plastic face and cutouts for the eyes of the person wearing it. This is just one of the things that can be found in the archives, a space few know about but houses information about every student to ever attend the school.
The archives are curated and maintained by archivist Neva Fuller. A typical day as an archivist involves a range of tasks, including making transcripts, creating new software for digital yearbooks, and processing donations. “There’s a big table in the archive right now that has all the stuff I’ve gotten in the last year,” they explained. “Sometimes that’s stuff from alumni, or it could be publications that get sent, and then I’ll process them and tuck them into boxes.”
Some of Fuller’s favorite artifacts include the school uniforms worn by girls who attended Northrop School. “Those are really cute,” they said.
Along the same lines, the archives house a football helmet from the 1930s, which Fuller said, “just looks really unsafe… the fact that they wore those is kind of nuts.”
However, their favorite artifact to receive is alternative publications. “In the ‘60s, there was a thing called the Blakely Barb, where [the students] would kind of critique the school and publish it in their own way, like a zine,” Fuller explained. “A couple of copies ended up in the archives, so we got to save them and know what they were thinking back then.”
On Mar. 5, the school offered “Ask an Archivist” day, which included tours to the archives during both lunches. Students saw the Cyrus the Bear costume and many other artifacts. Alana Krush ‘27 explained, “We just took a loop through the [archives] and looked into some of the boxes.”
Krush’s favorite artifact was the Cyrus the Bear costume, but she also enjoyed seeing the old uniforms that the seniors used to wear many years ago.
Fuller believes that it is important for students to see the archives because “you don’t get to be in archives very often unless you go to a university and you decide to do research in their archive… so it’ll give students an idea of, ‘I want to go into research’ or ‘archives are something I would want to work in.’”
