Throwback Thursday, or #tbt, has become a weekly social media ritual. It’s simple: post an old photo and hashtag it #tbt. First popularized on Instagram, the trend has bubbled over to Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr. Elizabethtown College’s Office of Marketing and Communications, which manages the College’s official social media accounts, has found its somewhat-regular Throwback Thursday participation to yield higher-than-average engagement than other posts. The amount of likes, shares and comments make it clear that people enjoy nostalgia.
It only seemed appropriate, then, to use Throwback Thursday to help celebrate the launch of “Elizabethtown College,” the latest title in Arcadia Publishing’s College History Series and promote an April 2 “Meet the Author” event. On Thursday, March 27, rather than ask people to guess a year or share a memory related to an archival image, they were invited to create a caption for a photo of a man talking to occupants of horse-drawn carriage parked on a campus dirt road (shown below) for a chance to win a copy of the book.
Coauthors, Jean-Paul Benowitz and Peter DePuydt each selected a winner from the dozen or so entries collected on Facebook and Instagram. Congratulations to Jenny Malik ’13 and Robert Mason for submitting these winning captions:
“Wow, the new campus security vehicles are nice. Lots of horse power!”
“So I guess you won’t mind if I check in the back of the wagon”
Malik, who wrote the horsepower caption, said she loves comparing old pictures of the college to how campus looks today.
“It’s amazing to see the transformation that the college has gone through in the past 100 years,” said Malik, in an email. “It’s funny to think that someday Elizabethtown College students will be looking back at pictures from my time at Elizabethtown and comparing it to whatever it is in the future.”
Other captions were:
- Elizabethtown’s first carrot cake delivery!
- Of course Campus Security will provide a horse and buggy escort to your dorm building!
- So, you’re gonna take this buggy full of marshmallows to Messiah and do WHAT with them? Pfhh, like that’ll catch on…”
- Already ahead of its time and a proponent of mobile learning, the College library first started out in this wagon-wheeled bookmobile.
- The first Etown Food Truck. Did they accept Jay Bucks?
- Who wants to do donuts in the Dell?
- The campo rides have come a long way.
- Do you want a ride on the Alpha trail?
- The original bird feeder.
- The Bird Feeder sure has come a long way since 1899.
From Throwback Thursday to perusing archives in the High Library, there are many ways to look back on Elizabethtown College’s history through pictures.