Inside the NA Archives
with Seniors Damian and Sebastian
By Jim Coe, Newark Academy Archivist
As Newark Academy prepared for its 250th anniversary, Damian Correa ’24 and Evan “Sebastian” Dias-Sotiriou ’24 found their interest piqued. The duo saw an opportunity to indulge in their passion for history by examining the archives of the school they have called home since sixth grade. Though they initially embarked upon their research without a specific final product in mind, they felt that whatever they found in the archives could serve as a foundation for their Creativity, Activity, Service (CAS) project, a core component of the International Baccalaureate (IB) diploma they are both pursuing.
Damian and Sebastian batted around a number of possible topics and final products: a presentation to the school on the importance of former Head of School Samuel Farrand, a paper about NA during the Great Depression, or even a podcast about the Academy’s last 50 years. The final idea arose after the seniors interviewed NA luminaries like former Assistant Head for Academic Affairs, Dean of Faculty and Archivist Blackwood “Blackie” Parlin and members of the still closeknit Class of 1969.
Damian and Sebastian left the interviews with a renewed interest in the more recent history of the school — a history both students felt was underrepresented in Suzanne Geissler’s A Widening Sphere of Usefulness: Newark Academy 1774–1993. With the school’s sestercentennial on the horizon, the friends found the proper motivation to create “Newark Academy and Social Change: 1950–2024,” a written account of the last 50 years of the school’s history.
I sat down with these two student historians to learn more about their time spent diving into the NA archives.
Jim Coe (JC): Do you have a favorite fun fact that you uncovered while looking through the archives?
Damian Correa (DC): There was a kid who was a teacher.
Sebastian Dias-Sotiriou (SDS): Damian is referring to Philip Whelpley, who was the son of the Headmaster Samuel Whelpley, and was a teacher at Newark Academy before his 15th birthday!
DC: That was amazing to uncover because at the time we were literally a year older than someone who would have been teaching at Newark Academy.
JC: Wow. Any other fun facts stick with you?
DC: The other one I love and I know that Sebastian loves as well is the “golf ball test” that used to take place. If you could drop a golf ball down your trouser leg and it went all the way through, you would have to go and change your pants.
SDS: There’s another really good one, which is that when Newark Academy first moved to its current campus in Livingston, the land was actually a farm, and NA had spent all its endowment in the move. With that, the school didn’t actually have enough money to pay the seeders to put down grass. So, in an innovative deal, the seeding company agreed that if NA removed all of the debris off the campus itself, they would put down all of the grass. NA community members spent two or three school days just removing rocks from the entire campus. Apparently, Mr. Parlin lost a shoe during the ordeal because he was using it to fill everything up with dirt. Then, former Head of School Dr. Allan Strand gifted Mr. Parlin with a shoe during his 25th year at NA.
JC: How funny! So what were the biggest challenges you faced working with archives?
SDS: I’d say reading old handwriting is a lot more challenging than you’d think.
DC: Oh yeah, the penmanship was very difficult to read. We went down to the New Jersey Historical Society and started reading through these large documents and then realized, we can’t read the first 200 pages. So we were trying to figure out how to read cursive in the moment — and it wasn’t just cursive like nowadays’ cursive — it was old cursive
SDS: And the funniest part for me was that the 1700s cursive was a lot easier to read than the 1800s. In the 1700s, there was clear penmanship and you could figure it out, but in the 1800s, it looks like someone just drew a line across. It’s very hard to read.
JC: I guess you’re wellversed in cursive now! Are there any lasting lessons that you’ll take away from your last year and a half spent on this work?
DC: I would say, when you read about these people’s lives and you go through their entire life in two and a half hours, it puts some perspective on your own life and the impact that you make. People like Mr. Parlin have left a lasting legacy that you can see. So that’s been a big takeaway for me.
SDS: For me, I had a different takeaway. Damian and I have been at NA since sixth grade and we have always thought of it as this really great place — and I’m not saying that historically it hasn’t been. I’m saying that Newark Academy over the last 20, 30 years is a different place than it was before. I guess it puts into perspective how everything could have changed. Newark Academy, if it did not pick up great leaders like Dr. Strand or even Samuel Farrand, might not exist today. My takeaway, I guess, is how lucky we are to have such a great school, because very minor historical changes could have meant that it would not exist today.
