Fraternity History & More

Paleontologist Mignonnette “Mignon” Talbot became a member of the Kappa Kappa Gamma chapter at the Ohio State University in 1889. She followed her sister Ellen “Nellie” into the chapter. She earned Phi Beta Kappa honors.

From 1894-1900, Talbot served on Kappa’s Grand Council as Grand Registrar. In 1913, a reflection that she wrote appeared in The Key of Kappa Kappa Gamma with this sentiment, “Since I am writing for the ‘old girls’, those who knew me in what I call ‘the good old days in Kappa’, I am going to be personal and write about myself as I should want other ‘old girls’ whom I know to write about themselves.”

She told about the years in between her service on Grand Council and the writing of the letter to the “old girls”. Her parents died with days of each other in 1899. From 1900-1902, she “continued to teach in the high school in Columbus, Ohio, at the same time carrying on graduate work at the State University and keeping up a home for my brothers.” Talbot doesn’t likely know it, but her words in the Kappa magazine rebutted this snarky value judgement entry I found on wikipedia when I started researching her (“Born into the upper-middle class with her maternal grandfather being a doctor and her father being the superintendent of a school for deaf children, she had the opportunities to pursue a post-secondary education and further a career in academia.”)

Talbot added, “In the fall of 1902 I worked in paleontology, entirely, at the University and after Christmas went to Yale and took up work under Professor Beecher along the same lines. Most of that summer and all of the next year and much of the following summer was spent on the work for my doctorate which was received in June, 1904 at Yale.”

She was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in geology from Yale and was also the first woman to be admitted to the Paleontological Society. She finished her entry with:

After four or five weeks in camp (my ordinary summer recreation), I went to Mount Holyoke College to take charge of the department of geology. The ordinary advancements through the ranks up to that of professor followed automatically. For six years I was alone in the department but for the last three years I have had an instructor associated with me. My sister was at Mount Holyoke before I came and for the last two years my young brother and his family have also been here.

Of her life in South Hadley she said it had:

run along with a scarcely a ripple, an extremely busy life as all who are in the profession of teaching must know. As for ‘going into the world and accomplish something’ I fear that I cannot claim to have done that. I am nothing but an ordinary college instructor, aiming to give the girls who are under me something more to take away with them than simply book-knowledge, aiming to teach them to think for themselves, seemingly a hard thing to do, due in part, I think, to the fact that they have so little contact with the masculine minds of their own age, (you can see that I do not believe very thoroughly in colleges for women only) aiming also, as every one who teaches my subject must, to fill our minds with wonder and awe and the greatness of work which the Creator accomplished in the formation and development of our earth and with high appreciation of His great foresight and love in so bountifully providing for his creatures a world which seems to be so perfectly adapted to their needs.

In 1910, Talbot made a very big discovery in the fertile area where Mount Holyoke is located:

One small addition to science I have had the good fortune to make. Over two years ago I chanced to stumble upon an almost complete fossil skeleton of a dinosaur, one of the extinct reptiles which belonged to the Triassic period, a reptile that roamed through this beautiful Connecticut valley in days when its topography was very different from what it is now, so different that we probably should not recognize it could we see its picture. This fossil proved to belong to no known genus and I therefore published its description under the name Podokesaurus holyokensis. My regular work has left little room for research and that is the only research work I have done since leaving Yale.

The dinosaur Talbot found was described in a 1911 publication. She was the first woman to discover and name a dinosaur that was not a bird. In 1917, the Museum at Mount Holyoke burned to the ground and almost all of the specimens were destroyed including the dinosaur Talbot found. Replica casts of it still exist. The Podokesaurus holyokesis, however, became the official state dinosaur of Massachusetts. Podokesaurus holyokesis is said to mean “swift-footed lizard of Holyoke.”

She spent her entire teaching career, 31 years, at Mount Holyoke retiring as chair of both Geology and Geography in 1935.

In her 1913 letter to her Kappa friends, she added:

Going back to Kappa, at no time have my sister and I been the only members of the Fraternity on the campus. Winona Hughes of Beta Gamma, Margaret Stecker of Psi, and Eleanor Hunsdon of Beta Epsilon have all been here and much of the time there has been one student, at least. Once or twice a year we manage to get together and  have a Kappa meeting with members of the faculty and students from Smith College, and ‘Goodnight, my sister, ere we part’ is sung by a dozen or so voices, carrying us back to the ‘good old days in Kappa.’

One would hope that those Kappa meetings kept on going through the decades. Mignon Talbott died on July 18, 1950.

Kappa Kappa Gamma Memorial Service, July 13, 1952