The Norwich University Archives includes photographs of students from as early as the 1840s. While our earliest images are portraits of individual cadets, group photos are frequent staff favorites. A few examples can now be experienced as digital jigsaw puzzles!
You can give these puzzles a try on our website. Puzzle difficulty can be adjusted by changing the number of pieces. The images featured are also shown and described below.
This portrait of cadets in front of the South Barracks at Norwich, Vermont, dates from the early 1860s. At the time, Norwich University and its forerunner, the American Literary, Scientific, and Military Academy, had been educating students for over forty years. The four-story South Barracks structure behind the cadets was one of two principal buildings on campus. When that building was destroyed by fire in 1866, the same local photographer behind this image captured that scene. Both views are preserved in a photograph album we acquired last Fall.
After the South Barracks fire, the university relocated from Norwich to Northfield, Vermont. Our first decades in our new location were marked by struggles with enrollment as this photo of the Class of 1888 (with other cadets and including only ten subjects) illustrates. At the time of their 50th reunion, the Class of 1888 had six living members, including three who were able to make it back to campus for commencement in 1938.
Enrollment had increased by the early 1900s when summer school sessions focused on practical engineering fieldwork emerged as part of the curriculum. An annual group portrait of summer school students posing with their surveying equipment became a facet of these engineering summer camps. This photo from 1908 is one our earliest examples and includes Taraknath Das, one our first students to attend from Asia, in the third row from the front, second from the right.
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