John Marshall High School finds 1880s grade book featuring Charles H. Mayo during renovation process

Jul. 19—ROCHESTER — Anyone passing by the statue of the Mayo Brothers downtown probably doesn't spend much time imagining what they were like as teenagers. And yet, once upon a time, Charles H. Mayo was just that — a young person with no idea he would go on to have one of the most recognizable names in medicine the world over.

With the renovation of John Marshall High School underway, things were being shuffled around the school. And in the back of a closet was a grade book from the 1880s that featured the academic progress of one of the two Mayo Brothers.

"School districts should be proud of all students, but especially the people who go on to greatness," Superintendent Kent Pekel said. "That would have been the era when he was driving around with his father, watching surgeries."

At the time, Mayo was studying at Rochester High School, which stood decades before John Marshall was built in the 1950s.

The inscription in the grade book referring to Mayo says he was admitted in 1881. For students at the time, the Civil War would have been more recent than today's students learning about Sept. 11.

It also means it was written several years before the now-infamous storm that went down in history as the origin story for the Mayo Clinic becoming what it is today.

A school official at the time wrote a disclaimer at the front of the book.

"I found no permanent records when I came here in 1880," the school official, H.O. Duskee, wrote. "I have given credit by + for work completed before that time."

In a list of "subjects completed," Mayo received + marks in three categories: Introductory Latin Book, physical geography, and Latin Reader. Other students, however, like his classmates Delmer, Blanche, and Arthur, received numeric values in the same categories.

The grade book indicates Mayo's contemporaries studied a slew of subjects that would sound foreign to today's students: Xenophon's Anabasis, Introductory Greek, and Natural Philosophy.

According to Experience Rochester, William Worrall Mayo, the father of the Mayo Brothers, arrived in Rochester in 1863 as a surgeon during the Civil War. Charles was the younger of the two brothers. His brother William was four years older.

"By 1880, Rochester had become a regional urban center with a population of 5,103 people," Experience Rochester's history of the city reads.

In 1883, a tornado came through the area, resulting in two dozen deaths. That disaster went on the spur the creation of the Mayo Clinic that has since become the most reputable medical institution in the nation. Charles H. Mayo was one of the innovators to make that happen.

"As teenagers, both boys were going around watching their dad essentially pioneer medicine," Pekel said. "The rest is history."