A high school reunion that was begun over 80 years ago by the former students of Wethersfield’s first superintendent, Frank H. Craig, will meet Sunday after a three-year hiatus. That hiatus was the result of the COVID-19 pandemic that forced them to cancel the annual reunion of what is now called the Frank H. Craig Wethersfield Alumni Association.
The reactivated gathering will be held at 1 p.m. in the school cafeteria and begin with a potluck meal followed by a brief program and business meeting. Wethersfield’s new superintendent, who just completed his first year, Dr. Andrew Brooks, will be a special guest and WHS’s oldest living graduate, Marvin Hamilton, (Class of ’42), 98, and now living in Normal, Ill., will be honored.
There will be a discussion by those present about whether or not they should continue holding the annual meeting and, if so, should any changes be made, such as opening the meeting up to all graduates of Wethersfield High School, a sentiment expressed by Mr. Craig, himself at one of the first meetings, according to the minutes.
The Craig/Wethersfield Association is unique among high school reunions which normally include all years, because it is limited to alumni who have graduated 50 or more years ago. As members of each class reach their 50th reunion, they are invited to attend.
In the summer of 1939, around 50 of Mr. Craig’s former students met at Chautauqua Park and decided to form an organization called “The Pupils of the Northwest Room.” The name refers to a classroom on the second floor of the Blish Building where Mr. Craig formed the first high school class in 1903 and taught students there, along with one other teacher, until 1915 when the township’s first high school was built across McClure Street.
The group agreed to meet once a year on the third Sunday in August and set dues at 10 cents. Officers were elected and one person from each of the 33 classes that had graduated at that point was selected to contact the other members of their class to invite them to the meeting each year. A few years later, it was decided to send postcards and as the number of graduating classes has increased over the decades. The mailing list has grown to over 750 postcards. Most of the alumni at this year’s meeting will include classes from the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the first four classes from the ’70s, and a few alumni from the 1940s.
Soon after it began, the group changed the “Northwest Room” name to the Craig Alumni Association, over the objections of the modest educator. As the years went by, the former students taught by Craig passed away and the group began to include alumni from additional classes who were never taught, or eventually even knew, Mr. Craig.
In 1957 they had reached the first class (1907) to hold a 50th reunion. Members of that class were invited as special guests and it was decided to honor the class that reached that year each time they met going forward. The organization finally decided to cap membership at classes graduating 50 years or more from WHS in part, because contacting everyone was becoming a challenge, and because, according to the minutes, they felt “the younger classes wouldn’t be interested.”
Before the former Craig students formed their organization in 1939 there apparently was a Wethersfield Alumni Association. Forming an alumni association was discussed by Craig with the first class of high school graduates in the spring of 1907. In 1912, five years after they graduated, they held their first reunion. There are news reports of the activities of an organization called the Wethersfield Alumni Association in the Star Courier in the 1920s and early 1930s about election of officers, sponsorship of a reception for new graduates each year in June and had an alumni basketball team, but any mention of the association dropped from the pages in the summer of 1939, about two months before Mr. Craig’s former students decided to organize at Chautauqua Park.
The group has been involved in several ways in preserving Mr. Craig’s memory and his contributions to the school system. At their third meeting, in 1941, the alumni donated a portrait of Mr.Craig to be displayed in the northwest room of the Blish Building. Instead, the portrait of Craig seated in a chair with a book in his lap, was presented to the township high school he helped build in 1914-15. Shortly after his death in 1943, the association voted to purchase a bronze plaque in memory of Mr. Craig but shortage of materials due to the war effort postponed the project until 1947 when the 12-by-15-inch plate was attached to the back of the granite Wethersfield Centennial monument on the school grounds. In 1959, the alumni initiated the effort to name the former high school, then the junior high, the Craig School. Unfortunately, the building was destroyed by fire in January of 1965.
In 1991 a Frank H. Craig Scholarship was established to be presented to a graduating senior planning to be a teacher. In 2015 that scholarship was expanded with a request from the late Lois Gleason (Class of 1940) and an active member of the alumni association. Both scholarships are supported by donations, are now available for up to two graduates each year and provide $1,000 each of four years in college as long as the recipient meets enrollment and academic requirements.
Craig’s accomplishments, in addition to moving students from the village’s two overcrowded school buildings on the west side of the 300 block of Tenney Street into the new, two story brick building on the Commons, was in organizing the first high school class, and building the township’s first high school. They included creating the first manual training program in woodworking; beautifying the grounds around the school with hundreds of trees and flower beds; installing the first playground equipment; getting the high school accredited in 1916 and forming the first PTA in 1917.
Upon his death in 1943, Craig willed his property on the northeast corner of Tenney and McClure streets to Wethersfield Township where a township office was built, The current township office was built on the site in 1976 with the Craig/Wethersfield Alumni’s August reunion the first meeting held there.
Summing up Craig’s contributions at a reception held when he retired in 1918, Galva Superintendent F. U. White said
“The one thing I wish to emphasize is the untold good that has come to this community through the silent influence of the splendid character, devotion and unselfishness of Mr. Craig. Nothing finer can come into a boy’s or girl’s life than contact with such a teacher.”
***Sources: Minutes of the Frank H. Craig Wethersfield Alumni Association, Kewanee Star Courier archives, and Mr. Craig’s 1935 autobiography.
