Last November, Wines found the image in an 1840 article about the then-new college while he was “systematically” sifting through periodicals at the Catholic Historical Research Center of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. He came across an issue of the Catholic newspaper the Truth Teller with a headline “New Catholic College, at Rose Hill, Westchester County, New-York.” The article appeared a year before the institution, which would become Fordham, was founded as St. John’s College. It was also a time when Westchester still held jurisdiction over the area, and when New-York was still hyphenated.

“I think it’s probably the only copy in the world and this was probably included as part of the original fundraising campaign to get the college started,” Wines said. “These are newspapers that are not indexed on Google. You have to actually just go page by page.”

Wines said that historians like himself have to go where the material is. In many cases, Fordham’s history is spread out among several libraries, from O’Hare Special Collections at Fordham’s Walsh Family Library to Columbia University’s Avery Library to the Hesburgh Libraries at the University of Notre Dame.

“The fact is we can’t bring everything to Fordham, so we bring the information and then we tell people where we found the information,” said Wines.

The woodcut print reveals many lost details of the original building, and the accompanying article brings to light information about the building’s interiors as well as the heretofore unknown, if somewhat repetitive, name of the architect: Thomas Thomas (1781-1871), a well-established architect who was also working on St. Peter’s Church on Barclay Street in Manhattan.

The new building’s entrance opened onto a central hall with a spiral staircase that swept up to the second floor and a rooftop lantern, providing light and ventilation. A southern room of the house—now the president’s office—was, fittingly, a chapel. Just off the chapel was a working greenhouse. The northern wing served as a refectory. A back porch overlooked a pasture that is now Edwards Parade, and the marble Greek Revival front steps, still in use today, looked out on Martyrs’ Lawn.

From Teacups to a Manor House, Excavating Rose Hill

Gilbert and Wines have spent a good portion of their careers researching Fordham’s history.  Gilbert is the editor of Digging the Bronx: Recent Archeology in the Borough (The Bronx County Historical Society, 2018), which includes a chapter written with Wines titled “Seventeen Years Excavating at Rose Hill Manor.” The book takes a practical look at archeology in the Bronx, including a chapter on the business of archeology to specific cases, as well as case examples of excavations in Van Cortland Park, Riverdale, as well as Rose Hill.

Gilbert said the 70-page chapter on Rose Hill is just an overview of the 17-year excavation. The excavations, which began in 1985, allowed scores of students from history and archeology classes to uncover everything from teacups to religious medals to the foundations of the original buildings, including Rose Hill Manor, which was razed in 1896 to make way for Collins Hall. Much of the material that was excavated fills rooms in Dealy Hall and in the basement of Cunniffe.

“If you look at the college’s history from 1890, the original Manor House was said to have been [George] Washington’s headquarters. That is romantic, but he probably just rode by on a horse,” said Wines, before adding, “We discovered in Washington’s papers that during 1776, a detachment of colonial troops was on campus. They were camped in the orchard. We found him coming back again in 1781.”

Dispelling campus lore is a necessary part of the job, said Gilbert.

“In our business, we’re trying to uncover as much new information as possible about what this place was like. Decades, centuries ago, before the college came here,” Gilbert said. “Ultimately, what we discovered, and what we probably knew subconsciously anyway, is that when local histories are put together, they’re frequently put together very quickly with very little information and that once those narratives form, they become fossilized.”

Staying Power

The drawing of Cunniffe House depicts the early days of an institution whose students would go on to bear witness to a civil war, two world wars, Vietnam, 9/11, as well as the current coronavirus crisis, which, with the recent wholesale shift from face-to-face interaction to online interaction, is unique in Fordham’s history.

The college held classes throughout the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. The 9/11 tragedy caused disruptions, but there was not any notice to vacate campus, said Gilbert. Wines said that campus protests during the Vietnam War are the closest parallel. The upheaval forced the administration to send students home and faculty were instructed to grade them on the basis of work completed for the semester—but this was well before laptops and Zoom allowed for instruction to continue, he said.

While Gilbert and Wines agreed that many romanticize the past, sometimes Fordham’s history can be quite, well, romantic. On reading the 1840 description of today’s Cunniffe House in the Truth Teller article, it’s hard not to be taken in by purple prose, some of which holds to this day.

“It is located in a beautiful situation remote enough from the city to make it in the country, enjoying all the advantages, and yet so near the city as to afford it all the conveniences attainable in town,” reads the text accompanying the image.

The article continues on to delve into the architectural details of the “blue free-stone building,” mentions the new railroad that was being built a short distance from the college, and waxes poetically about how the “river Bronx meanders not far from the college, amongst undulating fields, and magnificent forests.”

When the image of Fordham appeared in the Truth Teller, University founder Archbishop John Hughes was still 13 years away from announcing the construction of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. For the newspaper’s Catholic readership, the new college represented hope and staying power for the future. One particular phrase in the text accompanying the image, still resonates, particularly now:

“…[I]t will stand a perineal monument of zeal and success to the admiring eye of posterity.”

“This was a working farm from colonial times all the way down to about 1907 or so,” said Roger Wines, Ph.D., FCRH ’54, professor emeritus of history, who has written about Fordham history in partnership with anthropology professor Allan Gilbert, Ph.D.

The food was produced within sight of the building—today’s Cunniffe House—where the students studied, slept, and ate. On the site of the Rose Hill Gym was an orchard that produced apples, pears, and cherries, according to the professors’ research. Potatoes, corn, and other crops were also grown on campus. A vineyard on the site of today’s college cemetery yielded two or three barrels of wine per year, and the field at present-day Fordham Prep was a pasture populated by 30 to 40 cows.

The farm produced “a good percentage” of the food and milk for the college, according to a new history of Fordham by Msgr. Thomas J. Shelley, GSAS ’66, professor emeritus of theology. Wines and Gilbert said the college also purchased meat and groceries from New York merchants, and Fordham’s first Jesuits, Frenchmen who liked to drink wine with dinner, imported wine from Bordeaux to supplement what was produced on campus.

Dietary staples at Rose Hill included beef and pork; pigs as well as cows were raised at the farm, Wines and Gilbert said. On special occasions, students dined on oysters and other shellfish. Bread was probably baked on campus, and vegetables may have been grown in a greenhouse east of the University Church. Jesuit brothers oversaw food production.

(In recent years, Fordham students have made a modest return to Rose Hill’s farming roots by maintaining St. Rose’s Garden on one edge of campus and organizing a weekly Fordham Farmer’s Market in front of the McGinley Center.)

After a few decades, the students’ dining area was moved from today’s Cunniffe House to a newly completed space in Dealy Hall. Eating was a solemn affair, far removed from the freewheeling atmosphere of today’s campus dining venues. It was strictly regulated by the college’s Rules and Customs Book, according to a chapter by Gilbert and Wines in Fordham: The Early Years (Fordham University Press, 1998), edited by Thomas C. Hennessy, S.J.

A student read aloud from literature or history during meals, and No. 5 in the Rules for the Refectory section of the customs book required students to eat in silence so they could “give an account of what is read, if called upon.” Students stopped eating at the ringing of a bell and then rose to face the prefect, answer a prayer, and make the sign of the cross before turning to silently leave in single file with their arms folded.

Indeed, students were expected to keep quiet during most of their daily routine, which was akin to the rigors of a “medieval monastic regime,” according to Msgr. Shelley’s book, Fordham, A History of the Jesuit University of New York: 1841-2003 (Fordham University Press, 2016). But they still found moments for food-related levity, he wrote: “God sent food; the devil sent cooks,” the students would gripe, echoing a longstanding complaint of college students everywhere.

“An unfinished house in a field” is how Archbishop John Hughes would later describe the state of Fordham’s property at the time he bought it in 1839. The first Jesuits wouldn’t arrive until 1846, five years after the small college was up and running. Meanwhile, going south into New York City was a tougher trek in those days before cars and commuter trains—and that’s just how the college fathers liked it.

“They didn’t let the students go down to the city. The city was considered ‘sinful,’” said Roger Wines, PhD, professor emeritus of history.

He and anthropology professor Allan Gilbert, PhD, have researched and written about early life at Fordham for years, drawing on the meticulous records kept by Fordham’s early Jesuits as well as their own excavations at the Rose Hill campus. Their archaeological work, part of which they write about in a soon-to-be-published book, helps illustrate just how different life was in the early years of Fordham, which was founded as St. John’s College 175 years ago on June 24, 1841.

For one thing, the small, rustic college was also a working farm, Wines noted. “The students lived here in an atmosphere where the grape jelly came from the grapes [and]the milk came from the cows,” courtesy of the live-in Jesuit brothers who also shoveled the coal, tended the grounds, and staffed the infirmary, among other labors, he said.

Water came from wells, baths were once-a-week, and recreation tended to get the blood pumping, according to Wines and Gilbert. In the summer, it was swimming in the Bronx River or cross-country hikes to the Harlem River or Pelham Bay, led by Jesuits who believed in physical exertion. In the fall,  college elders would block the flow of a stream to create a pond where the campus’ large parking lot and garage sit today, and students skated on the pond when it froze over in the winter, Gilbert and Wines said.

In fact, ice skate fragments were among the many artifacts they found buried in the earth at the heart of the Rose Hill campus.

The Excavations

In 1985, Wines and Gilbert sought permission from Fordham’s then-new president—Joseph A. O’Hare, SJ—to excavate the foundations of Rose Hill Manor, the colonial-era farmhouse that served as one of the original campus buildings. They won over Father O’Hare by taking him to the spot where they wanted to dig: “We said to him, ‘Six feet down is the 18^th century.’ He said, ‘Okay, go for it,’” Wines recalled.

For the next 17 years, they mobilized students from their history and archaeology classes for the digging, covering the crumbly innards of the site with tarps in the off-hours to protect them from the elements. Within a few years they had cleared out one corner of the manor’s cellar, finding a wood floor, brick cisterns, impressions of floral-patterned wallpaper, a bin full of anthracite coal, and many fragmentary objects.

They also dug in various other places around the Rose Hill campus, including, in 1986, the construction site for two residence halls–Loschert Hall and Alumni Court South–after work crews discovered two pits containing pre-1877 refuse from the college. They explored cisterns, drainage basins, and ditches around campus, compiling a list of archaeologically valuable locations.

Their collection of artifacts includes pipe stems, patent medicine bottles, the college’s first set of dishes, rods of lead for writing on slate, and the remains of a toothbrush made from bone and hog bristles. They found dice, combs, pottery, and religious medals, and a remnant of one of the era’s advances in communications field: the nib of a steel pen, a device that allowed for easier writing than did the goose-quill pen that came before.

Studies at St. John’s College

Writing—or, more to the point, penmanship—was a key part of the curriculum, and was especially important for finding a job. “Employers judged your character and fitness for the job on how clearly you could write,” Wines said. Students also studied Greek, Latin, history, literature, and other classic subjects in a custodial, highly structured setting. Students lived barracks-style in wings that were added to what is today Cunniffe House (the “unfinished house in a field” Hughes referred to), the same building in which they attended class. Rose Hill Manor had various occupants over the years, including Jesuits-in-training.

Students followed a six-year curriculum—modeled on a European lycee—that the Jesuits brought with them in 1846. It comprised three years of grammar (corresponding to an American secondary school) and three years of college-level humanities. After six years, students received a bachelor’s degree, and those who stayed for one more year could earn a master’s in philosophy.

The students numbered anywhere from 100 to 200 for the first few decades, and some were adolescents, possibly as young as 10.

Unlike the College of St. Francis Xavier, the companion college founded in Manhattan by Fordham’s first Jesuits, the college at Rose Hill could draw students from beyond the New York area because it was a boarding school. About a third of the students were Latin American boys from merchant-class parents who wanted them to be able to speak English and do business in New York while also maintaining their faith.

“This was a good place to send them because they would be in a safe Catholic environment,” Wines said. “Nothing bad was going to happen to them.”

The Jesuit Approach

Vice wasn’t the only worry in the city to the south; hostility to Catholics in New York led Hughes—named the first archbishop of New York in 1850—to buy the college’s land through an intermediary, Gilbert said. Hughes also made sure the charter for the school was approved before announcing it was being taken over by Jesuits, whom critics considered to be “political priests,” Wines said.

The Jesuits brought a rigorous system with them in 1846. Students cycled through a regimen of prayers, study halls, classes, meals, and occasional recreation that stretched out across six-and-a-half days a week. (The weekend hadn’t been invented yet.) They began the day by washing their faces in sinks filled by a servant who’d drawn water from the well outside, and everyone went to bed at the same time every night when the candles or whale oil lamps were snuffed out.

The students stayed in this closely supervised setting for a longer school year, one that lasted until mid-July. One principal teacher taught all major subjects to each class, paying close attention to the moral as well as intellectual formation of students. “They really took care of you for a whole year” and found out everything, including “things you probably wish they didn’t,” Wines said.

Recreation consisted of ball games or indoor games played with plain objects like marbles or dominoes—which Gilbert and Wines found during their excavations—or, simply, words and imagination. “There was nothing to buy; you just made it up,” Gilbert said.

Preserving the Past

He and Wines have put much of the relics into safe storage in Dealy Hall and are exploring the possibilities for finding them a new space. Wines is working on a book about the early history of Rose Hill and the Bronx, and he and Gilbert wrote a chapter about their excavation of Rose Hill Manor for a forthcoming book, impishly titled Digging the Bronx.

In its pages, readers will see the many ways in which schools, colleges, and other institutions are exploring the history of an area that has been transformed from countryside into a major metropolis, all within the lifespan of Fordham.

“It’s a range of different kinds of applications, so that people get a sense for how many sorts of people are out there digging in the ground,” Gilbert said.