For Raymond Beck ’75, the online auction site eBay is occasionally a treasure trove of Elon artifacts, and one of the latest finds for the retired North Carolina State Capitol historian and site manager was a gold medal from the “Clio” literary society engraved with the name of the man who received it as a graduate of Elon College's Class of 1893.
Beck, the university’s 2006 Distinguished Alumnus of the Year, has found eBay to be a source for rare and unusual “Eloniana.” Sheet music. Photographs. Postcards. Over the past decade, his discoveries and subsequent winning bids have been a boon for the university, which receives his memorabilia as gifts to the archives.
Now, the medal, which at one time belonged to alumnus R.H. Peel and is also engraved with the Latin phase “Nitimur in adversum,” is shedding light on what values and traditions Elon fostered in its earliest years. The rough translation of the Latin phrase is “I struggle against the opposition.”
“I was just looking under ‘Elon College,’ which is normally where I look for stuff. This medal happened to crop up,” Beck said. “When I saw the date, I thought, my gosh, that’s two or three years into the school’s existence! I just put a bid on it and was lucky enough to come up with it.”
Not much is known about the medal or the man whose name is engraved on it. The Clio literary society was one of three societies formed shortly after the university was established in 1889. Peel, one of 10 graduates in the class of 1893, would later serve as a minister of the Christian Church, Elon’s then-denominational affiliation, in his home state of New York.
Why he was given the medal is one question that remains. Beck theorizes that it might have been an award presented by the Clio Society to its best orator/debater for the academic year of 1892-1893.
“There are at least two or possibly three similar medals, that Elon’s archives has in its possession,” Beck said. “This medal is not unique, but it might be a part of a pattern that the gold medals were awarded on an annual basis.”
Beck donated the medal to the university in honor of J. Earl Danieley, Elon’s president emeritus and a longtime friend. He said he hopes the medal will provide Danieley and his Winter Term history course on the University with yet another topic for research in the coming year.
Given that many of the College’s records were destroyed when the Main Building burned in 1923, the medal adds substance to an early Elon era for which there are few known or surviving artifacts.
“So much of Elon’s earliest history and its institutional ‘memory’ were destroyed in the fire of 1923,” Beck said. “This individual item stands on its own merits, but you also should take the view of its being yet another small piece of the much larger puzzle that is Elon pre-1923.”