Charles, Mignon and Fred: Meet the staff of 1892
When the first issue of Ohio State’s student newspaper The Lantern appeared in 1881, the student body was composed of 280 students, and they were taught by a faculty of 12 professors and three assistants.
Despite the simplicity of life reflected in its early pages, the student writers and editors behind The Lantern were a complex bunch. This photo of the 1892 staff reveals a pioneering and diverse group who laid the foundation for the kind of multifaceted students Ohio State would welcome in the years to come.
The Lantern staff of 1892. (University Archives)
1. Charles B. “Caesar” Morrey ’90
Morrey was a Lantern alumni editor and one of Ohio State’s first quarterbacks. He earned his medical degree from Starling Medical College in 1896 and returned to the university to found the Department of Bacteriology.
2. Edith Cockins ’94
Cockins was associate editor at the Lantern and also worked on Makio, the yearbook. Three years after graduating, she was appointed as Ohio State’s first registrar, a position she held for 47 years. She oversaw over 60,000 student records and developed a system to organize diplomas for commencement. That system is still in use today and places personal diplomas in the hands of thousands of graduates every year.
3. Herbert Scott ’93
A son of Ohio State’s third president, William H. Scott, he joined five other siblings in graduating from the university. After obtaining his degree, Scott was chief executive in his father’s office and attended divinity school at Yale University for two years. He then entered the ministry and became pastor of First Methodist Church of Zanesville.
4. Mignon Talbot ’92
She was treasurer of her sophomore class and exchange editor for the Lantern. Talbot went on to study at Harvard, Cornell and Yale, where she received her doctorate in paleontology. In 1904 she became head of the geology department at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. She was the first female paleontologist to discover the fossils of a dinosaur, called Podokesaurus, near the grounds of Mount Holyoke College.
5. William M. Ray ’93
Ray would become chief engineer of the C L & W Railway at New Philadelphia, Ohio.
6. J.G.M. “Alphabet” Skinner
Skinner was managing editor and an 1893 representative of Ohio State in a statewide oratorical contest.
7. Fred Patterson
Patterson, one of the first African Americans to attend Ohio State, was active in the Horton Literary Society, business manager for the Lantern and a football player. Just shy of finishing his degree, Patterson left in 1892 to become a history teacher in Kentucky. He eventually returned to Ohio to take over his family’s carriage business, which had been founded by his father, an escaped slave, and would become an automobile manufacturer.
