Mary Elizabeth Johnston Papers

The papers of Mary Elizabeth Johnston consist largely of scrapbooks assembled between 1910 and 1972 by Johnston as a record of her family life in Oberlin, her teaching career and travels, and activities in retirement.

The collection is arranged into five records series: Series I. Correspondence; II. Diaries and Memoranda Books; III. Biographical Miscellany; IV. Scrapbooks; and V. Photographs. Within series, files are typically arranged alphabetically by topic or type of material or chronologically. The present arrangement maintains the foldering established by the archivist in 1984.

Mary Elizabeth Johnston's close ties with her family are revealed in correspondence (1925-66) from her sister, Ruth Phillips Freeman (1895-1966), and from her niece, Pauline Johnston Webb (1918-57). There are a few letters written by her mother, Mary Phillips Johnston, during the two years prior to her death in 1932. Letters from her cousin, Theodore D. Phillips, a former Head of the Music Department at West Virginia State College, describe his family life and activities in retirement. Miscellaneous family papers provide biographical information on Miss Johnston's brother, Byron B. Johnston, his first wife, Rose Lowry Johnston (d. 1920), and his children, Pauline Mary and Byron, Jr. (d. 1922). Files include wills, deeds, birth and marriage certificates, and Mary Johnston's grade reports from Oberlin High School (1905-07) and Oberlin College (1910-12). Photographs of the Johnston family are housed in Series V.

Lecture notes, scrapbooks, photographs, and miscellaneous printed material document Miss Johnston's teaching career in North Carolina and New Jersey (1912-55) during the period prior to desegregation. These materials may constitute among the richest documentation in the collection. Scrapbooks assembled during her twenty six-year career at St. Augustine's College in Raleigh contain newspaper clippings relating to the prominent evangelicals, Gypsy Rodney Smith and Billy Graham (b. 1918). Later scrapbooks document the controversy surrounding the conversion in 1955 of the Bordentown School, at the time a manual training school for African-American students, into a school for boys with intellectual disabilities, a move that cost Miss Johnston her teaching position there.

Five of eleven scrapbooks pertain to Miss Johnston's activities in Cleveland during her retirement (1955-82). Johnston collected clippings, church bulletins, conference programs, notes, cards, invitations, brochures, and other ephemera for her scrapbooks, each of which was devoted to a particular interest. These interests included her work as a successful United Thank Offering fund raiser for the Episcopal Diocese of Ohio, as a member of the Cleveland Public Library's "Live Long and Like It" Club, the "Karamu House", the Phyllis Wheatley Association, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer Senior Club. Two scrapbooks contain clippings relating to the family of Oberlin College President William E. Stevenson (1900-85) and Robert Kenneth Carr (1908-79). It was during the end of Stevenson's administration in 1958 that Miss Johnston began donating money to the college. Correspondence from Annual Fund Director Edward S. Tobias (b. 1928), and from other Oberlin College Development Office personnel, relating to the management of Johnston's reversible trust, is housed in Series I.