Raquel Guzmán Cruchaga, the wife of Chilean diplomat Juan Guzmán Cruchaga, waits to christen the S.S. Hillsdale Victory with a bottle of champagne. Courtesy | Mossey Library

In the Hoynak Archive Center, black-and-white photographs and artifacts wait to share the story of their history with curious visitors. Two new exhibits, one on the S.S. Hillsdale Victory and one featuring the Carus Coin Collection, are now on display.

Sophomore Natalie Spaulding, who curated the S.S. Hillsdale Victory collection, first decided to work in the archives after her freshman orientation tour of Mossey Library. Special Collections Librarian Lori Curtis showed Spaulding’s group a picture of a navy ship and asked them what it was.

The photograph featured the S.S. Hillsdale Victory, one of 160 victory boats built in 1944 by the U.S. Maritime Commission. 

“I would hold up a picture and say, ‘Who knows what this is?’ No one knew, of course, but then I could give a little background,” Curtis said. “That brief introduction to the story inspired a student last year to do a documentary film, and then for Natalie to make the display.”

The cargo ships were used at the end of World War II to replace the bulkier Liberty Ships. Each was named for an American university, and Hillsdale College was chosen among giants like Harvard and Yale University.

“I got to basically design the exhibit from day one. I had the whole wall to fill out, seven cabinets total,” Spaulding said. “Not the entire collection made it into the exhibit. Then I went through and wrote captions for all of the materials and figured out a design theme.”

In 1944, once the victory ship was ready to launch, various donors and employees of the college gathered at the dry dock in Richmond, California to christen the ship. The party was led by Chilean diplomat and poet Juan Guzmán Cruchaga, his wife Raquel, and chairman of the Chilean delegation to the United Nations Joaquin Fernandez.

“Miss Vivian Moore was the first to collect all this material and kept it at her house,” Curtis said. “Unfortunately, her house caught fire in the 1960s. You can tell by looking at some of the photographs that there’s smoke damage on the edges.”

The boat was built by industrialist Henry J. Kaiser’s Permanente Metal Corporation at his shipyard. These two names would later become synonymous with Kaiser Permanente, one of the largest medical groups in the nation.

The S.S. Hillsdale Victory went on to serve in the Philippines and Okinawa during the last year of the war. The boat has since been purchased by a Dutch shipping company and sold for parts.

Across from Spaulding’s exhibit in the Hoynak is the Carus Coin Collection, curated by library technician Sarah Gilchrist.

“I plan to work with some students this coming month for a museum studies class,” Gilchrist said. “As far as exhibits or displays, I like to just pick a topic. One of the displays in the Hoynak is about German hyperinflation. I’ve got coins from that period and banknotes as well.”

The German display is a part of the larger collection owned by the college.

“The largest donation was given by a man named Alwin Carus in 2004. He traveled a lot. He learned about the German hyperinflation during the 20s and visited Germany during that time,” Gilchrist said.

The college received roughly 1,000 coins from Carus alone, with currency ranging from ancient to modern and from China to England.

“You put them in little slabs because it’ll keep it airtight. You don’t want any oxygen, any air or other particles messing with the metals or the design on the coins,” Gilchrist explained.

Spaulding learned her archival skills from both Curtis and Gilchrist. They work as a team to make the archive collections more accessible.

“We’re working towards making the Hoynak Center more accessible to students, faculty, staff, everybody,” Curtis said.

The S.S. Hillsdale Victory display will be featured in the Hoynak Center for the remainder of the semester.

“I love what they did with the archive center for the President’s Ball,” Spaulding said. “I thought that was great because they made it what it’s supposed to be: they made it an art gallery.”