Virginia Mann Hammet

Arthur's wife, Virginia ("Jennie") Mann Hammet, was the granddaughter of an Irish immigrant, John Hammet, who settled in Camargo, III., just south of Villa Grove. (6) Virginia was born at Camargo, and attended schools there. Then in 1877, at age 17, she enrolled at the University of Illinois at a time when very few women went to college, and received a bachelor's degree from the College of Natural Science with excellent grades in chemistry, biology, and mathematics. Her science work was done under Prof. Thomas Jonathan Burrill (after whom the University's microbiology building is now named), and her thesis dealt with bacteria, about which very little was known at the time.

She was very active as a student, serving in the Alethenai women's literary society, the Natural History society, and the senate of the student government She also served as president of the oratorical association.

"Someplace I saw a picture of the graduating class," Peter Westergaard recalls. "There weren't a lot of women in that picture, and it must have been a pretty ... unusual thing for a woman to go to college. I don't know what the circumstances were that got my grandmother to college, but I gather from my mother's description of her that she was a person with a lot of interests and a lot of vitality."

Both Virginia and Arthur graduated from Illinois in 1881. Virginia then spent a year of study at Wellesley. Meanwhile, "right after he graduated, Arthur went off to work on the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad," Herbert Gilkey notes. The job was on the location party of a narrow-gage mountain railroad. "He worked in Colorado, near Colorado Springs. I have some old photographs that he took of that area. They put the railroad through a pass there. It's a very steep grade -- if you drive in a car today you drive right alongside those railroad tracks. He wrote letters to my grandmother at that time. (7) They were not yet married."

"Grandfather later told the story of losing a transit into a deep gorge," Arthur II says. "He and another member of the survey party descended into the gorge to retrieve the transit. Upon returning to the crest of the gorge, they found all of the other members of the survey party massacred by Indians."

After their marriage in 1886, and while they were raising their family, Arthur and Virginia often traveled to points in the "Far West", where Arthur continued to be engaged in engineering work. Arthur joined the University faculty in 1885, and Virginia continued her interest in alumni affairs and helped establish University organizations, including a local branch of the Association of Collegiate Alumni. She served as the secretary of the class of '81 for many years. "All the time I was growing up." Barbara Fuller recalls, "the members of the class of '81 would come back for reunions and the house was the center for that every year. One grandson of a classmate lived there for a term or two after World War II, going to school. There was a tremendous class feeling that they kept up for all those years. We used to go over and put the class colors on the class tree before a reunion. It was just a constant thing. Even after we moved there after grandfather had died, this utter stranger would be at the front door and he had been a classmate of grandfather's and he wanted to see the house!"

Arthur and Virginia's four children were born between 1887 and 1898, during which time Arthur was promoted to professor of municipal and sanitary engineering and placed "in charge of theoretical and applied mechanics." All four children later married and had children of their own; but Virginia lived long enough to see only two of her eventual ten grandchildren. She died in 1919 at age 59 after a short illness.

Virginia's first grandchild, Phillips Talbot, remembers seeing his grandmother; but since he was only about 3 years old at the time and was living in Pennsylvania, Phil has only a vague recollection of his grandmother.

"It may only be my mother's [Rachel's] picture of her mother [Virginia]," Peter Westergaard says, "but this was a woman who was full of ideas and entertainments and full of projects that would enlighten life in some way or other. And these interests I would gather from my mother must have been what she picked up on, had to do with a kind of entertainment that was popular in the late 19th century -- charades and plays and pageants and quite elaborate things that were involved -- writing little plays and making the costumes for them." She was also active in the First Congregational Church of Champaign and served on the advisory board of the YWCA.

"My mother [Dorothy] had copies of some of the research papers grandmother had done for either the 30 Club or Social Science club," Barbara Fuller adds. "I n those days faculty wives got busy and researched things themselves; they didn't just listen to lectures."

Virginia was also fascinated with her own family's history. She collected letters from her father and grandfather, which cast considerable light on farm life in Illinois. A copy of her collection, called the Hammet Letters, resides in the University Library. (8)