To learn more about this collection please see the finding aid link found above, and/or visit the College and Lutheran Church Archives to use these primary sources.
Almen-Vickner Foundation. Records of the Almen-Vickner Foundation, April 1945- August 1978. GACA Collection 212. 3 folders.
ABSTRACT:
The Almen-Vickner Foundation Collection consists of the articles, by laws, meeting minutes, and financial information regarding the endowment created by Edwin Vickner and Bertha Almen, his wife, in 1951. The purpose of this foundation was to provide scholarships and in-grant aid to students at Gustavus Adolphus College. The collection begins in 1945 (when talks of giving back to the college first began) and spans until the foundation was dissolved in 1978, whereupon its remaining assets were placed within the college’s Endowment Fund.
Edwin Vickner became a modern language professor at Gustavus Adolphus College in 1903, but he left just three years later. Vickner decided to return in the fall of 1910, accepting a position over one at the University of Michigan (due to a pay raise offer from President Peter August Mattson). A year, later Vickner married a Gustavus alum, Bertha Almen, and together they left St. Peter for the University of Washington in Seattle in 1912. Vickner took over the Scandinavian Languages and Literature department, which he greatly expanded, teaching there until his retirement in 1948. Although gone, the two maintained interest in the well-being of the college. In the 1940s they created the Almen-Vickner Collection as a supplement to what was already housed in the library. Upon retirement, the two returned to Minnesota and increased their endowment to the college to include scholarships and various donations. After Vickner’s death in 1958, Bertha donated the money from his estate to create the Edwin J. Vickner Language Hall at Gustavus Adolphus College.
