Love notes and ‘crude’ doodles unearthed beneath a high school’s floors after 150 years

Blast from the past.

150-year-old love notes written by high school students were found in the floorboards of a school in Maine, according to Bangor Daily News.

Preservation contractor Lee Hoagland started working on the University of Southern Maine’s Academy Building in 2022, and over the course of a year he found hidden papers in a space between the first and second floors of the building built in 1806. 

The papers included love letters between former students of what used to be a private college preparatory school for children aged 10 to 17 for upper-class families.

“Ada, would’nt you like to swing after school? I will stop if you will. Will you? Write and say!” one of the notes reportedly said.

“My darling, why did…” another note read.

A different note said that a student named Belle Worcester “is a [prissy or pretty] girl.”

Worcester is mentioned several times in the notes, including in one that said, “We had a splendid time to (meeting?) last night, for Belle and I passed notes. We didn’t pass many though, for Mr. Lord was right behind us.”

Hoagland also discovered math equations, English conjugations and penmanship exercises in the school’s floorboards.

He saved the papers and gave them to associate professor Hannah Barnes.

The students also wrote expletives and insults about their teachers in the letters — proving teenage behavior hasn’t changed a century and a half later.

“The past is not as distant as we think it is,” USM historian Libby Bischof told the Bangor Daily News.

Bischof also addressed how one note featured a drawing of a teacher, Ms. Stevens, with a long, cartoon-like nose.

“What really struck me was the Miss Stevens cartoon because it was so crude. Not in crude in a lewd way, but crude like a really bad sketch,” she explained. “And I could tell Miss Stevens had really large eyes because that’s the defining feature.”

While students wrote things about their fellow classmates and teachers on paper back then, nowadays “it’s all text and Snapchat,” Bischof pointed out.

“We’re not going to have this for future generations,” he added.

According to Bangor Daily News, the old papers are currently being kept in USM’s Department of Art. There are plans to archive the notes in the school’s Special Collections.