William Sanders and Sarah Cordelia Bierce Scarborough Family Photographs
William and Sarah Scarborough were educators and writers in Greene County, Ohio, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. William Scarborough migrated to Ohio from Georgia, graduating from Oberlin College in 1875. He spent a year at the Oberlin Theological Seminary before joining the classical department at Wilberforce University in Greene County. In 1878 he received a Master of Arts degree. Sarah Cordelia Bierce was an 1875 graduate of the State Normal School at Oswego, New York. She served as principal of the Normal Department of Wilberforce University from 1877-1887, and for the next twenty-seven years, as principal of the Combined Normal and Industrial Department at Wilberforce. William Scarborough moved up through the ranks of faculty and administration at Wilberforce, eventually becoming president of the University in 1908. During their career as educators, both wrote frequently, Sarah focusing on fiction for women’s and Christian magazines, and William on scholarly topics. William joined a variety of professional and race-related organizations, including the Afro-American State League and the American Negro Academy, while his wife pursued her family’s genealogy, collecting correspondence and documents for the Abbey and Bierce families. The collection consists of individual photographs of Scarborough, Bierce, Abbey, and Grant family members and other family members, friends and associates. Also included is an album of views of Tretton Place, home of the Scarboroughs.