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Ophelia Parrish was an 1869 graduate of Christian Female College, a
two-year school for young ladies in Columbia, MO. She traveled
extensively in Europe and the Holy Lands, taught for a time in a
rural school and was principal at Pierce City, 1880-81, before
accepting her first long-term appointment as English and French
teacher at Springfield High School. In 1890, she took a year’s
leave to study at the Berlitz School of Languages in Berlin and at
the Sorbonne and College of France in Paris. She then returned to
Springfield High for an additional year before being named Assistant
Superintendent of Schools in 1893. She left the Springfield system
in 1899 to join the faculty at the First District Normal School.
Miss Parrish was the first
faculty appointment made by the Normal’s new president, John R Kirk,
when he named her Supervisor of the Demonstration School. This was
an elementary school operated on campus by the Normal faculty as a
practice school for its student teachers. In 1903, when the
decision was made to consolidate all the departmental libraries into
one central college library, the Board of Regents selected her as
the first full-time Librarian and gave her the assignment of
organizing the new facility.
In
addition to her year of study in Europe, Miss Parrish continued her
education by attending various institutes and summer sessions. She
studied at the Martha’s Vinyard Summer School, 1890, and the Cook
County [IL] Normal, the summers of 1894 & 1895. After being named
Librarian, she took courses in her new field at the Library School,
Chautauqua, NY and spent the 1914-15 winter quarter training at
Joseph F Daniels’ library school in Riverside, CA.
Off campus, Miss Parrish was active in the Missouri
Federation of Women’s Clubs. She served at least two terms as the
State Chair of the organization’s Bureau of Literature and
Reciprocity, the committee that was charged with aiding local clubs
in organizing their libraries in “regular library order”.
Ophelia Ann Parrish, the daughter of Dr William & Ann Mirah (Eastin) Parrish, was born
July 5, 1850 in Springfield, MO and died October 29, 1915 in
Kirksville. After a short memorial service at the funeral home in
Kirksville, a large procession of students accompanied her casket to
the Kirksville Wabash depot. President Kirk and several faculty
members then took her home for burial at Springfield Cemetery.
The
Gentry-Parrish Memorial Loan Fund, for students who needed financial
to help stay in school, was established in honor of Miss Parrish and
Professor BP Gentry by students and faculty that fall. Gentry
died from injuries received in a street car accident in Kansas City less than a week
after Miss Parrish’s death. Other campus memorials to her include
Ophelia Parrish Building built in 1922 and an oil portrait by Jack Bohrer dedicated in 1948. “OP”, as the building is known in campus
oral shorthand, was for many years the home of Kirksville Junior
High and served as the college’s practice school. It now houses the
university's art, music & theatre departments with up-to-date classrooms, studios,
performance halls and art galleries. The larger than life-size
portrait of the school’s first librarian hangs in Pickler Memorial
Library’s Special Collections Department. |
