Hendricks, Cecilia Hennel, 1883-1969

Cecilia Hennel was born in Evansville, Indiana on March 2, 1883 to Joseph H. and Anna Marie Thuman Hennel. The Hennel's moved from Evansville to Bloomington in 1905 so that their daughters - Cora, Cecilia, and Edith - could attend Indiana University. Cora was the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in Mathematics at IU. Cora would remain at IU teaching Mathematics at IU for the next 40 years and co-authored a math textbook. Cecilia obtained her A.B. in 1907 and her A.M. in 1908, both in English, from IU. While a student at IU, Cecilia edited The Arbutus and contributed articles to numerous professional journals. Cecilia taught the first correspondence course at IU and taught in the English Department at IU for over 25 years, from 1907-1913, and from 1931-1953, when she retired. Edith received both the A.B. and the A.M. in Botany, and taught botany at IU for two years before she left in 1914 to become a probation officer in Gary, Indiana for the Lake County Juvenile Court. She married Edward Ellis in Chicago in 1917.

Cecilia joined the faculty as an Instructor of English from 1908-1913, and served as Dean of Women at IU during the summers of 1912-1913. In 1913, she moved to Powell, Wyoming to marry John Hendricks who was a member of the Shoshone Federal Irrigation Project team assigned to cultivate a bee farm. While in Wyoming, Cecilia and John had three children - Cecilia Barbara (Mrs. Henry Ethan Wahl), Jules Ord, and Anne Carolyn (Mrs. John DeCamp). At President Bryan's request, Hendricks returned to the IU English faculty, where she remained from 1930-1953. In 1940, she founded the Indiana University Writers' Conference as a way of fostering the study of creative literacy tradition in the Midwest.

As a research subject, Cecilia Hennel Hendricks represents several areas of interest, including writing instruction, reform in general public education, American higher education at the turn of the Twentieth Century, and homesteading. As a Wyoming homesteader, Hendricks served informally and formally the interests of public education, was nominated Wyoming's democratic candidate for State Superintendent of Public Instruction for the first time in 1922, and campaigned for governor Nellie Tayloe Ross in 1924. She was a newspaper reporter for regional publications, and made a preliminary study of a plan to develop a farmer's mutual fire insurance company.

While on the faculty at IU, Cecilia Hendricks was an advisor to the Mortar Board Society, and she organized and was the first secretary of the Hoosier Folklore Society. She was secretary and then president of the Phi Beta Kappa academic society for 17 years. She also designed and taught the first English composition class for foreign students. In 1950, she took a sabbatical leave and was an educational advisor in teaching English to schoolteachers at Kora, in the Palau Islands in the Pacific. At that time, she edited a 60-page dictionary of the Palau language, made tape recordings of island music, and transcribed folk tales. After her retirement in 1953, Cecilia served as the John Hay Whitney Professor at Coe College. She remained active in various IU organizations and on special writing projects such as The Review, IU's alumni magazine. As a writer, Hendricks participated in the Cosmopolitan Club, served as the Editor of the University Publication in 1913, gave frequent lectures for campus clubs, worked as a news and magazine correspondent, published poems and plays in well-read periodicals, and volunteered in her retirement as a writing instructor for The Hospital Veteran Writing Project. In 1961, she received the IU Distinguished Alumni Service Award, and in 1963, Theta Sigma Phi awarded her a medallion for more than 50 years' of service to journalism. Hendricks died on July 15, 1969 at the age of 87.

The Bibliographical Note and other detailed folder level descriptions were written by Written by Professor Tarez Samra Graban, Amanda Hudson, and Kasey Lloyd in 2010 in conjunction with a class project.

From the guide to the Cecilia Hennel Hendricks family papers, 1843-1971, bulk 1896-1970, (Indiana University Office of University Archives and Records Management http://www.libraries.iub.edu/archives)