Constance Applebee at Mount Holyoke

In a previous post, I mentioned that I hadn’t been able to confirm Constance Applebee's reputed visit to Mount Holyoke during her original tour of women’s colleges in 1901. Almost every retelling of Applebee’s story that I have found includes Holyoke with Vassar, Bryn Mawr, Smith, Radcliffe and Wellesley as part of her original circuit. But I thought it was odd that I hadn’t been able to find any contemporary accounts of her visit there while the other schools had proved relatively easy to confirm. Among the only references I’d found regarding hockey at Holyoke in that era was this less-than-promising nugget from the November 1904 issue of The Mount Holyoke:

“Field hockey seems to have died out here; in many other schools it is played regularly.”

Even scouring the archives of The Springfield Republican yielded nothing at first, until finally last night I came across this piece in the April 28, 1902 issue of that newspaper:
 

Interesting grammar aside, I can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that Applebee does seem to have visited Mount Holyoke after all. I can see now some of the reasons it took me a while to find this particular clip: Applebee’s name is misspelled “Appleby,” the sport is referred to as “lawn hockey,” and the visit occurred in the spring of 1902 rather than the autumn of 1901.

I don’t know yet why the students of Mount Holyoke lost interest in the sport two and a half years later, but at least now I have a place to start.