The Classroom Printer, a
large wooden box filled with rubber stamps featuring such designs as letters,
words, animals, people, and buildings, inspired this reflection on the
schoolrooms of the past. Although our stamp set is now an antique collector’s
item, in its day it was an indispensable piece of classroom technology. A brief
history of the rubber stamp shows how its invention greatly enhanced everyday
people’s ability to communicate through printed words and images.
The Rubber Stamp: A Small
But Mighty Tool
It is always fun to see how
far an artifact can take us, and this month our Classroom Printer rubber
stamps will take us first to the Amazon jungle, the source of rubber trees. Long
known by natives as a waterproof coating and an adhesive, India rubber was
first used outside the Amazon during the 18th and early 19th
centuries to make pencil erasers. In the 1820s, the first waterproof raincoats
utilized this rubber for their repellant coating. However while the wearers
might have remained dry, the rubber coating also made them sticky. Somehow
rubber needed to be made more stable, and in 1839, Charles Goodyear accomplished
this through the addition of sulfur. Later in 1851, Goodyear received a patent
for vulcanized rubber, a hard substance that was resistant to temperature
changes, non-adherent, and almost completely insoluble. When a mixed sheet,
consisting of rubber with additives, was heated to 280-290 degrees Fahrenheit,
the rubber sheet became malleable for long enough to press it into a mold
before it hardened (vulcanized) (1).
While there were several
different claimants to the status of rubber stamp creator, evidence seems to
point to James Orton Woodruff as its true inventor. In a store during the
mid-1860s, Woodruff observed washtubs with names and item numbers printed on
their sides using a kind of stamp. Noting rubber’s effectiveness at applying ink,
he set out to make rubber stamp letters. Ultimately, he found that small
vulcanizers used in dental offices could help him create the stamps he desired
(2). The first rubber stamps
were usually packaged and sold in “marking sets” that included the characters
on today’s keyboards (3).
The field of business was
the first to make use of rubber stamps for creating more professional and
cost-effective signage. No longer did a business owner have to handwrite,
stencil, or pay for sign printing. Now, he could create his own signs and
merchandise labels using a set of rubber stamps. In the 1920s, rubber stamp
sets became popular for classroom use, enabling teachers to make flashcards and
worksheets. During the Depression when it became harder for schools to afford
textbooks, these stamp sets helped teachers create their own materials.
Classroom marking sets, like our 1932 Classroom Printer, could be purchased
from door-to-door salesmen (4). Now that we are in a day of photocopied
worksheets, full-color textbooks, and educational video and computer resources,
our rubber stamp set helps us reflect on the challenges and triumphs of
teachers in the past as they worked to open up the world of learning to their
students.
Special thanks to the Minnesota Center for Book Arts for their research assistance on the history and influence of rubber stamps.
Glass’s
Speller Review of 1929:
Honoring E.C. Glass for 50 Years of Service
Lynchburg has shown herself
proud of the Glass name as she honors the contributions of that family to our
local community, our state, and our country. While Senator Carter Glass
receives much attention for his distinguished political career, his brother’s
name might come up more often in everyday conversation. Today’s E. C. Glass
High School was named in honor of Edward Christian Glass (1852-1931), the
second superintendent of the city’s schools who served in that post for over 50
years (5).
Our second school artifact,
a booklet entitled Glass’s Speller: A
Review in Sixteen Episodes, is the program from a dramatic production
organized by the Lynchburg School Board and Teachers’ Club in 1929 to honor his
50 years of service as superintendent. Narrated by the “Spirit of
Learning,” the review follows the development of Lynchburg’s schools and pays
tribute to his character and contributions as it features dramatic and musical
talent from the area schools.
At the close of the review,
the “Spirit of Learning” adds E. C. Glass to “the list of the earth’s great
scholars” declaring that “in the pioneer days of Virginia’s public school
system, [he] blazed a trail in education which has since become a highway for
the youth of our state.”
On the Roll of Honor: A High School Report Card
Finally, it is report card time. In February 1883, Frank Johnson was placed on the “Roll of Honor” with an average of 96 2/5 recorded on his report card and signed by F. Roane. Founded in 1871, Lynchburg’s public school system was just over ten years old, but it would still be another 16 years before the completion of the first Lynchburg High School on Federal Street between 9th and 10th Streets, which combined all of Lynchburg’s white high school classes at one facility (see image below). Built by noted architect Edward Frye, the Lynchburg News hailed it as “probably the handsomest and best equipped High School building in the South” (6).
Over the next ten years, Lynchburg grew rapidly and soon required a larger high school building. When the new building opened on Park Avenue in 1910, the original Federal Street building became the Frank Roane School, an elementary school named for young Frank Johnson’s teacher. In 1920, the Park Avenue high school took the name of E. C. Glass, and finally, in 1953, the present-day E. C. Glass High School on Memorial Avenue was dedicated.
To check out images of
Lynchburg’s schools, some still in use and some only in memory, visit the
Lynchburg Museum’s historic photo collection and Nancy Marion’s photo collection.
- Sheila McNellis Asato,“Rubber Stamps – New Phenomena or Ancient Tradition” (June 2003): 5-6 (text of article provided by the Minnesota Center for Book Arts).
- Asato, 7-8.
- Asato, 8.
- Maja Beckstrom, “Stamp of Approval: The Popularity of Rubber Stamps Among Artists, Collectors and Crafters is Marked by a New Exhibit at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, January 17, 2004 (text provided by Minnesota Center for Book Arts).
- James M. Elson, Lynchburg, Virginia: The First Two Hundred Years, 1786-1986 (Lynchburg: Warwick House Publishers, 2004), 367-368.
- S. Allen Chambers, Jr., Lynchburg: An Architectural History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1981), 317.
--Author: Brandi Marchant, Museum Guide
