Local Legends: Domestic service

Sophronia Bulfinch Pike spent the majority of her life in service as a domestic, teacher, missionary and educator at Western College.

Pike was born in Ames Township, Athens County, Ohio on March 16, 1849 to Perley French and Mary Ann (Reed) Pike. She was the oldest of six children and had five younger siblings Azro Pike, Manville T. Pike, Granville R. Pike, Charles Reed Pike and Ida (Pike) Barkley.  

By 1860, Pike and her brother Granville Pike were living in the home of John H. and Julia P. Pratt, in the Village of Athens. John H. Pratt was listed in that year’s census as being an “Old school presbyterian minister,” and the reason for the two Pike children residing within his household remains unknown. Pike’s father, a veteran of the War of 1812, was fairly advanced in age at the time of her birth and died when Pike was 17 years old.

Pike became a student of Western College in 1871, joining the Class of 1875. She appears to have moved during this period, as class lists show her home as being both Athens and Warren, Pennsylvania at various times. Another record shows that she taught school in Pennsylvania, possibly the reason for her being in Warren.

By 1880, she had returned to Oxford and joined the faculty of Western College, which she later described in a letter as, “the best college for women in the world.” That same year, her sister Ida also came to Oxford where she married widower Thomas Barkley.

In 1881, Pike temporarily left Oxford to go live as a missionary at Fort Berthold, North Dakota.  Immediately adjacent to the fort, which had transitioned in the decades prior from being a trading outpost to an army fort, was the Native American reservation at Like-a-Fishhook Village, home to the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nations, today known as the Three Affiliated Tribes.

The decade of Pike’s life between the mid-1880s and mid-1890s appears is not well documented, though a city directory survives, showing a “Sophronia B. Pike” serving as a housekeeper for William Birch, possibly the industrialist and congressman of the same name, in Boonton, New Jersey in 1890-1891.

It’s possible that Pike may have been living and working in New Jersey while she attended the Chautauqua School of Domestic Science in New York. However, she graduated from the school, which was in session during the summer months, in 1899 after her return to Oxford, making the timeline somewhat murky.

In 1895, Pike took over as the house manager of the campus dormitory building, which would be dedicated as Peabody Hall in memory of the first principal of the college, Helen Peabody, a decade later. This was also the start of her service as the Director of the Domestic Department of Western College.  

Part of the Mount Holyoke model, upon which Western College was based, was the expectation that students would perform the daily duties needed to operate the institution, cooking, cleaning, etc. A 1954 history of Western College by Narka Nelson summarized this tasking, “the domestic work of the establishment was done by the young ladies themselves.”  

This was not only done purely as a cost-saving measure, but also because it allowed for tuition fees to remain low, making Western College accessible to students. The system could be viewed as an early version of present day work-study programs.

She was also remembered for the famous chocolate cake she baked for the College Day celebration held at Western. This was an annual welcome to the freshman class joining the Western College ranks in the form of a picnic to which their families were also invited.  

College Day, which began in 1904, was annually held in October, except for in 1912. That year, a fire began in the engine room under the kitchen resulting in a significant fire that rendered Pike’s chocolate cake “a smoke-stained ruin.”

Likewise, Pike also served a special dish for the graduating senior class as part of Western’s annual Senior Day banquet held to coincide with the celebration of George Washington’s birthday. The dish, which she called “ambrosia,” was a fruit cocktail which she first served in 1908.

Through overseeing the hands-on domestic training of all of Western’s students and through both welcoming and seeing off new and graduating students with her culinary creations, Pike became an institution at Western College. Her over 31 year tenure ensured that she was known to generations of Western students.

In fact, Pike remained in her position for such a long time that she saw the nature of the domestic program itself change. With the gradual shift towards a more contemporary framework for educating students, requirements for shared domestic work lessened. This change was described in Nelson’s book, “the household tasks, popularly known as ‘dom,’ were now reduced to one half-hour daily and were rarely more arduous than changing table cloth, filling salt cellars or lightly passing a broom over a flight of stairs.”

Nonetheless, Pike kept up with her students, taking pride in knowing each of them by name, and remained a member of the Home Economics Association. The time finally came for Pike to retire at the conclusion of the 1925-1926 school year. Retiring alongside her were Miss Clara Pierce and Dr. Mary Denton, the college physician, amounting to a combined loss of 70 years of experience for Western College.

In her retirement, Pike, who never married, moved in with her nephew Ellis Blake Barkley and his family in the Hendersonville area of Sumner County, Tennessee. She moved with them back to Bath, Indiana, the location of the Barkley Family farm, after a few years, possibly due to the effects of the Great Depression.

Pike had been diagnosed with heart failure the same year she retired from Western College. Her health once again declined following a hip fracture, following a fall. She died in Bath on March 9, 1936 at the age of 86. 

Her funeral was held at the Barkley’s home in Oxford and was interred in the Western College section of Oxford Cemetery along with her fellow alumnae and faculty members.

Brad Spurlock is the manager of the Smith Library of Regional History and Cummins Local History Room, Lane Libraries.  A certified archivist, Brad has over a decade of experience working with local history, maintaining archival collections and collaborating on community history projects. He also serves as a board member for Historic Hamilton Inc. and the Butler County Historical Society.