Mark Lee
With baseball season in full swing, D.H. Hill Library is doing its best to commemorate Wolfpack players past and present with a baseball exhibit that blends the spirit of today’s game with the tradition of yesteryear.
The museum style exhibit offers visitors an opportunity to turn back time as they view player portraits and team photos dating back as far as the late 1800s.
Anna Dahlstein, the librarian for External Relations, said compiling the photographs was one of the easier tasks because the University already possessed them. “The University Archives here in the [Special Collections Research Center] had an excellent array of historical baseball photographs,” Dahlstein said. “All of our photos over the years have come to us from Sports Information, now Media Relations.”
The display includes more than 60 photographs and offers viewers a glimpse at images of past Pack teams that would be difficult to find elsewhere.
“We picked a selection that we thought were both visually interesting and significant,” Dahlstein said.
Some students said they view the exhibit not only as a visual experience, but also as a learning tool. According to Samantha Warden, a freshman in communication, the exhibit is helpful to students interested in learning about State’s baseball past.
“It helps to educate kids nowadays of how things used to be,” Warden said. “It gives you an appreciation of how the sport has developed through the years.”
Dahlstein also said the student body’s strong affinity for sports is playing an important role in the display’s success.
“We obviously are a campus of sports fans,” Dahlstein said. “I definitely noticed people stopping and getting distracted by the exhibit.”
With a wide variety of photographs, the most interesting part of the exhibit is up for discussion.
“I think it’s really neat to see how the uniforms have changed over the years,” Dahlstein said. “I’m fascinated by the early team portraits from the 1890s and [the] turn of that century.”
Jeremy Johnson, a sophomore in civil engineering, said he has his own favorite part of the exhibit.
“The best part is seeing where the fields used to be,” Johnson said. “It shows how far we’ve come technologically.”
Another noticeable difference from the past is the number of sports that varsity athletes now compete in. Many of the players from the past were more than just baseball players.
“I’m filled with admiration whenever I look back at some of these players that played not just one varsity sport, but two or even three,” Dahlstein said.
Dahlstein said some of D.H. Hill’s media specialists share the students’ enthusiasm for athletics.
“A lot of the librarians here go to the baseball games and we have a pretty good relationship with the program,” Dahlstein said.
Wes Lowman, a sophomore in food science, said the exhibit will help to bring even more notoriety to State’s storied baseball program.
“Students are really proud of the baseball team here,” Lowman said. “The exhibit helps to emphasize America’s pastime as it was played here in Raleigh.”
Dahlstein said the past deserves its place in the present and it should be used to evaluate the institution’s journey in the game of baseball.
“It’s a really fascinating lens to look through at University history in general and what campus life used to be like,” Dahlstein said.
With renovations on the library slated to be finished at the end of this year, Dahlstein said she hopes the new facilities will hopefully pave the way for future exhibitions.
“We look forward to doing more shows in the future,” Dahlstein said.