Students curate an exhibit about Clapp Laboratory’s history
Mount Holyoke College students have created an exhibit, “Cornelia and Concrete,” about alum Cornelia Clapp and the 100-year-old laboratory building that bears her name.
Mount Holyoke College students Peregrine Basich Whitney ’25, Asya Anna Begovic ’24, Tara Castellano FP’24 and Becca Moses ’24 have dug deep into the century-long history of the campus’s Clapp Laboratory.
The result of their work is a College Archives and Special Collections exhibit, “Cornelia and Concrete,” which is currently on display in six cases on campus and also online. The exhibit covers the history of the Clapp Laboratory building and highlights the research and career of Cornelia Clapp, an 1871 Mount Holyoke graduate who became a pioneering research zoologist. The exhibit also focuses on women who continued Clapp’s legacy and showcases the herbaria created at the lab.
Clapp was a very early adopter of the laboratory method, which is an experiential approach that involves learning through personal observations and experience rather than relying on information published in books. She was also the first female researcher employed at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
Clapp’s teaching method was highly successful. Under her leadership, the zoology department outgrew Williston Hall, the building that had previously housed the life sciences at Mount Holyoke before an electrical fire burned it down in 1917. After the fire, departments either moved into new buildings or held classes in temporary labs until the 1924 completion of Clapp Laboratory’s construction. On Nov. 7, 1924, Mount Holyoke dedicated the building in honor of Clapp, who had retired in 1916.
The building cost $600,000 — equivalent in purchasing power to more than $10.6 million in 2024. When the work was finished, the College was still $50,000 short. So the students held an innovative fundraiser that divided the remaining cost according to the number of years each potential donor would spend in the laboratory. The students raised $52,000, which led the College’s staff members to dub Clapp Laboratory’s tower “The Student Tower.”
“This is an exceptional level of research,” Deborah Richards, Mount Holyoke’s head of Archives and Special Collections, said in an article the Daily Hampshire Gazette published about the exhibit. “I love that I have the opportunity for [present-day students] to work on these exhibits because I feel like it’s a really concrete way to build that connection with their history.”
Read the full article in the Daily Hampshire Gazette.
