GORHAM, Maine – While renovating a 200-year-old academy building, workers found a treasure trove of secret notes and doodles from students in the early 1800s.

The building, constructed in 1806, originally acted as a private high school, but was eventually absorbed into the University of Southern Maine as the campus grew around it.

As part of a multi-year-long renovation project on the building, construction workers ripped up rotten wood floors and walls, uncovering a bounty of old letters and papers.

The notes dated as far back as the early 1800s, when the building was first opened, and mostly consisted of notes that students were not supposed to be passing in class.

“This is sort of like the text messages or Snapchats they’re sending in the middle of class that they shouldn’t be,” said University of Southern Maine historian Dr. Libby Bischof. “‘Do you want to meet me down by the swing?’ or ‘Should we take a walk?’ These sorts of things. It is really about the social life of students.”

“We also have, I love this,” said the school’s Coordinator of Special Collections, Susie Bock. “It’s a little discussion, a little mini essay on apple blossoms and how lovely they are.”

Bischof said that the notes aren’t just love letters and plans after class, but include drawings and absent-minded doodles as well.

“There’s also really funny caricatures of teachers sort of focusing on prominent features like big noses,” she said.

Bock said that although the collection is lighthearted and humorous, it’s also an important window into what life was like 200 years ago. She has been working on cleaning and preparing the notes for exhibition and possible digitization, so that others online can come to their own conclusions about what the notes meant.

“Interpretation of the primary resources is going to change, but that’s why it’s important to keep the primary resources,” Bock said. “It’s an important piece of keeping history from being erased.”

Written for and published by Local 12 ~ April 18, 2025