Since completing the Richard M. Burr Congressional Collection (check my previous blog posts for more information about that project) I have been hard at work on the many new accessions that SCA has accumulated throughout 2025. Today, I present to you a roundup of some of these brand new accessions, all available for research in our reading room!

• Gray Family daily prayer calendar

  

  This prayer calendar belonging to Nathalie Gray is notable because it documents the death of her husband, Bowman Gray, Sr., at sea. The written text reads, “Bowman left us last night.”

• Lt. John E. Binnion World War II collection

  

  The bulk of this collection is letters written by Lt. John E. Binnion (Johnny Erstwhile, as he called himself) while at army training and while serving in Europe during World War II. He took these photos while serving in Italy.

• William Gaston Simmons Financial ledger and lecture notes

  

  This is a fascinating book–on the outside it looks like a simple ledger book, and given that W.G. Simmons was the college bursar, that is what I expected it to be. But as I started reading it, there is so much more to be found in this volume. The majority of the pages have lecture notes in the fields of chemistry and natural history. The first few pages were also used as a scrapbook, with newspaper clippings (mainly related to chemistry or other scientific topics) pasted in. There are some financial records to be found here, which could provide some information about college finances during the Civil War period.

• Ivan L. and Ruby Jenrette Bennett postcard collection

  

  This collection has about 100 postcards, mostly dated 1910-1916. The correspondence starts while Ivan Bennett was a student at Wake Forest College and Ruby Jenrette was a middle school student. The postcards feature humorous cartoons and images of local landmarks, including these images of Wake Forest’s original campus.

• Wake Forest College clippings scrapbooks

  

  The origin of these two scrapbooks from 1933-1934 is unknown, but they show snapshots of campus life from these years. They include newspaper clippings and event programs.

• William E. Woodard Army Finance School records accession

  

  This one was a crash course in Wake Forest history! In 1942, several buildings on campus were rented by the Army Finance School, which trained accountants for the army. This collection, dated 1943, includes photographs, course schedules, and graduation lists from the Army Finance School.