Mount Holyoke Days
Caroline Boa graduated in 1901 with a degree in English language and literature. Know as “Carrie,” while at Mount Holyoke, her name appears in the list of graduates shown in this Commencement program. The Class Prophecy, also shown here, noted that she would become a teacher and marry “a stalwart cowboy”. Her friend Rose Alden was predicted to become an English teacher at the “Alden School of Oratory”.
Caroline Henderson’s Herbarium
Caroline’s love for the land stemmed from both her childhood years in rural Iowa and her four years at Mount Holyoke. In South Hadley she began to create an herbarium, a collection of carefully preserved plant specimens. Pages from her herbarium are shown here with her handwritten cards identifying each flower.
Making an herbarium was a required practice for botany classes at Mount Holyoke until about 1910, and students were expected to identify at least 300 specimens. Mary Lyon herself created one, which became the nucleus around which the College created its original herbaria collection. Today these historic student plant specimen books are found in both the Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections and in Clapp Hall.
“We may go together to fulfil my part of the prophecy up on Mount Holyoke”
After graduation, Caroline taught high school English and Latin for six years in Iowa, her home state. In 1907 she joined her parents who had moved to Oklahoma. There she began a teaching position at Center School, near a settlement now known as Eva, and established a claim on a section of land across the road from the school.
In the below letter from spring 1908, Caroline tells Rose of her plans to marry Mr. W.E. Henderson in May. “Someday,” she writes, “we may go together to fulfil my part of the prophecy up on Mount Holyoke in 1901, for that located me on a western ranch.” In fact Caroline and her husband Wilhelmine (Will) would reside on their land in Oklahoma until 1966, up until the end of their lives.
Caroline met Will when he helped to dig a well on her claim. “[Y]ou could not help but realize that he is an optimist of the sincerest sort,” she writes to her friend, “ready to do all his part to make things come right with a faith above and beyond his own effort. I think sometimes it will worry me because he simply won’t worry over anything, but that is a pretty good failing after all.”
