By Jami Badershall,Staff Writer

FARMINGTON – Barbara Searway Sahlin traveled from Tacoma, Wash., to be at her 50-year class reunion at the University of Maine.

“It’s our 50th reunion and I’m still alive after a liver transplant 16 years ago,” the Ashland native said. “Any time I can see my old friends, I’ll be there.”

The university was still the Farmington State Teacher’s College in 1956, when 51 students, 20 of whom attended this past weekend’s reunion, graduated.

Carolyn Labbe didn’t travel quite as far as Sahlin to see her classmates but still had a long drive from her home in Presque Isle. A home economics major, she taught in schools in Waterville, Presque Isle and Fort Kent, her hometown.

“Farmington was my first experience away from home,” said Labbe, adding that she never thought she would be able to go away to college.

“My high school home ec teacher thought I should go away to school and study home living or home skills because she thought I did well in those areas, but I thought that I could never afford it.”

Labbe spent one year at the Madawaska Training School, a small teacher’s college, and then used a $750 scholarship she had earned from the Lion’s Club for being co-valedictorian of her high school class to go to Farmington.

“My mother had kept it in a creamer on the shelf,” she said, adding that her mother said she could wait on tables to earn more money if she could prove that she could work and keep her grades up.

Labbe managed to squeeze four years worth of classes into three years and worked as a waitress on campus to pay her tuition. That job led her to another waitressing gig at Valley’s Inn in Portland for a summer.

“I earned $1,300 in eight weeks, which was more than my mother made as a teacher in a year,” she said. “That paid for my junior year of college.”

Members of the class of 1956 are also a part of another anniversary on the Farmington campus: the 50th anniversary of the Mantor Library. Shirley Martin of Farmington was one of the senior class members who carried a total of about 20,000 volumes from the Edith Clifford Memorial Reading Room, a single room in Merrill Hall, to the present building.

“If you didn’t show up to help, you were reprimanded. At that time they were very strict.” Martin said. “It was our spring project you might say.”

According to UMF history, the original reading room was named in honor of Edith Clifford, class of 1890, who left the college $50,000 in 1944. The gift was the library’s sole source of financing for many years. In the 1950s, as the college attempted to gain national accreditation, many pushed for a more adequate library, and the Legislature appropriated construction funds for the new library in 1954.

In 1965, the library was dedicated in honor of Agnes Mantor, who had served as librarian from 1951 to 1965.