[Photograph album for 1926/1927 depicting life at the all-female Stephens College in Missouri]

1926. A photo album / scrapbook compiled by Mary Jane Irvine (Markey) (1908-1994) during her senior year (1926-27) at Stephens College for Women in Columbia, MO, the second oldest women's college in the U.S. The album includes approximately 200 photographs, newspaper clippings, and other related ephemera primarily depicting Irvine's social life at Stephens, but also her time as a teacher while attending Central Missouri Teachers College in Warrensburg, MO. The photographs portray Irvine and her classmates as goofy, carefree, and fun-loving individuals posing in casual wear, bathing suits, theatrical costumes, formal wear, & graduation gowns. Other photographs feature suitors, schoolchildren and possibly family members. There are also ticket stubs from sporting events, programs for plays that she acted in, invitations to various school and social engagements, dating permission slips, a collection of post marks, notes, calling cards, infraction notices from administrators, and notes from parents either questioning her disciplinary methods or instructing her to discipline their children. There are a handful of newspaper clippings, related to either her family, or from a school trip to Chicago, which included 400 girls. A wonderfully evocative document of life at an all-girls college, which Irvine chose to portray as carefree, fun, and filled with intimate friendships.

Mary Jane Irvine was born in Marshall, MO and attended Marshall High School where she was president of the Teachers Training Class of 1925. Following graduation she attended Stephens and then Central Missouri Teachers College in Warrensburg, MO, before marrying Ephraim Amos Markey in 1929. She died in Norfolk, VA, in 1994. The Eph and Mary Jane Markey Lobby at the Audrey J. Walton Stadium in Warrensburg, MO, was dedicated in 1994 through a generous gift by the couple's daughter.

Oblong (13 ½" x 10 ½") leatherette, embossed covers, string-bound. 27 leaves with photographs of ephemera affixed to both sides, the rest of the album blank. One leaf loose and laid in at the front, a few items loose or missing, but VG overall.