Asha Burgess Everett's Mississippi Normal College Scrapbook

One thing that people learn quickly about Southern Miss is that if you go to school here you take great pride in the school. Students at the University of Southern Mississippi have been making memories and forming bonds for over 100 years. This is evident in the scrapbook and notebooks of Asha Burgess Everett (1892-1990). While many things have changed over the years, several similarities make students' time here just so memorable.

Asha Burgess Everett was a student at Mississippi Normal College from 1913-1916. During her time as a student, she worked in the dining hall, attended several different churches, and made a lot of good friendships. During her time at the dining hall, she made biscuits and dried dishes. In Treasured Past, Golden Future: The Centennial History of the University of Southern Mississippi by Chester M. Morgan, the book states that the student waitresses in the dining hall organized a dining hall club and even had a theme song. Throughout her scrapbook, she has so many notes and letters given to her by her co-workers and friends from the dining hall about not forgetting the memories they made and how much they value their time in the dining hall with her. Asha Burgess Everett also has several pamphlets from a variety of churches around the Hattiesburg area, including Main Street Baptist Church and Main Street Methodist Church.

One of the most interesting parts of Asha Burgess Everett's scrapbook was the personal interviews of her friends and the variety of humorous notes she created. These notes seem timeless and relate to how students feel in the 2020s. These pieces of the scrapbook shed light on students' desire to just "get by" and how college students think about school and relationships, and it seems like not much has changed. One of her notes claims to save time, money, and embarrassment, students should be kind to all because kindness costs nothing and helps a great deal. When it comes to what Asha Burgess Everett wrote about school, she penned a poem about test anxiety and made a "Recipe for Getting By." This recipe includes things like one spoonful of laziness and two pinches of dignity. Asha Burgess Everett also interviewed her friends asking them questions about relationships, favorite sayings, occupations, and what they thought of her. In the early 1900s, her friend Louie Jaxler's favorite saying was "Gee Whiz," and Myrtle Larsen's occupation was "dreaming dreams". When she asked her friends about past and present relationships, she received answers like "He is absent" and "Who knows." I believe most students can find these parts of the scrapbook relatable and comical.

In Asha Burgess Everett's files, it includes 2 Blue Jay brand composition notebooks. In her scrapbook, she includes an entry that states, "Always remember the Blue Jay notebook you will surely have to use if you go to M.N.C." Her Blue Jay notebooks were used for biology and botany classes, and she also had a hygiene notebook. In biology, she wrote notes on mold, plants, and bacteriology. In her hygiene course, Everett learned about the different home responsibilities for boys and girls. For the boys, the tasks included feeding cattle, cutting wood, working in the yard, preparing fences, and more. The girls' tasks included sweeping, making beds, cooking meals, and caring for the children. In the hygiene notebook, it was in the women's task list to brush their teeth, but this was not included in the men's tasks.

Another student who went to Mississippi Normal College, Fleet C. Burkett, had similar experiences to Everett as he said some of his favorite memories were created at MNC. He took English, math, and agriculture classes, and had a job making 15 cents for clearing stumps for the college. How interesting is that that while there are many differences between how students live today compared to 100 years ago, there are also so many similarities in the issues that students encounter?!

Hannah Boyette, Sophomore, Biological Sciences

**Items of the Month featured in 2024 and 2025 will be the work of Southern Miss students who took HON 303, a seminar held in Fall 2024 focusing on archives and special collections.