University of Virginia Library

8. FREDERICK WINSLOW PAGE (1826–1913)
Librarian 1881–1882, 1891–1903

Since Frederick Winslow Page's first connection with
the University of Virginia Library was prior to the librarianships
of William Winston and James Baker, various
details concerning him have already been given; namely,
that he was appointed Assistant Librarian in 1876, that he
succeeded William Wertenbaker as Librarian in 1881, that
he was ousted by the Readjuster Board of Visitors in 1882,
that he then became Deputy Clerk of Albemarle County,
that he had been called back to the University in 1888 to
fill the new office of Clerk of the Chairman of the Faculty,
and that he was restored to the library post in 1891.

The popular conception of the genus Librarian, as
illustrated at the Rotunda, must have been quite different
in Page's day from what it had been at the beginning of the
University. When Wertenbaker succeeded Kean, both were
college students. When Page succeeded Wertenbaker, the
latter was eighty-four years of age and the former fifty-five.
The position had grown old with Wertenbaker; and at the
time Frederick Page became a fledgling Librarian, he had

already been a practicing lawyer, a newspaper publisher,
a veteran artilleryman, and a farmer.

He came of a famous Virginia family. Dean James
Morris Page and Professor Thomas Walker Page of the
University of Virginia Faculty were nephews of his. Librarian
Page's paternal grandfather was Major Carter Page of
the Revolutionary Army, who married Mary Cary of Ampthill,
Chesterfield County, her line running back to Pocahontas.
His father was Mann Page, doctor of medicine, who
lived at Keswick (sometimes called Turkey Hill) in Albemarle
County, and who married Jane Frances Walker of
nearby Castle Hill. He himself was born at the Turkey Hill
estate on 20 November 1826. He was a student at the University
of Virginia for the three sessions 1843–1846; and his
“Random Reminiscences” of those days, as contributed to
College Topics in 1909, were quoted by Philip Alexander
Bruce in volume three of his History of the University of
Virginia. Later he returned to the University for a fourth
session, 1848–1849, this time for courses in law. In 1850 he
married Anne Meriwether of Kinloch, Albemarle County,
and settled in Lynchburg to practice law. Seven years later,
however, he decided to move to Petersburg, and there he
joined with Robert Bolling in publishing the Petersburg
Intelligencer. News coverage had its limitations in those
days, but subjects for editorial comment were plentiful.
The Intelligencer supported John Bell in the presidential
election of 1860. When war broke out, Page enlisted as a
private in an Albemarle artillery company commanded by
Captain William H. Southall, and he fought through the
war. At its close there seemed little opportunity for law
practice or newspaper publishing, and Page, with his wife
and seven children, turned to farming for a reconstruction
livelihood, so that when he was called in 1876 to aid in the
custodianship of the University Library, he came like Cincinnatus
from the plow.

At the Library he found a truly congenial vocation.
Habits of reading and the ability to appreciate and judge
what he read had been acquired in his college days; and he
was uniformly helpful and encouraging in his contacts with
student readers. The fine quality of his courtesy is stressed
in contemporary references to his services as a Librarian.
When he retired in 1903, the Faculty paid him a tribute
from which a cogent passage may be quoted:—

The longer and more significant period of his librarianship,
1891 to 1903, was Januslike in effect. Catastrophically
divided by the burning of the Rotunda, it looked backward
to the Library founded by Jefferson and forward to the confused
beginning of the present Library. Librarian Page
was better qualified to be the last of the old than to be the
first of the new. The services lauded by the Faculty were of
course more capable of performance where order and personal
knowledge of the books were assets. In Librarian
Page's eight years after the Rotunda fire the conditions were
of constant confusion and of a rapid but poorly assimilated
influx of gift books. Of modern technical aids there was
practically none. Under the pressure of daily circulation
demands, Page had no leisure to prepare such aids—and it
is indeed doubtful whether he had much conception of
their nature and value. Moreover the years had taken a toll
of his physical strength. The steadiness and courteous character
of his service were maintained, but there came to be
a shadow of discouragement over his part in the new
Library.

During the ten years between his retirement in 1903

and his death on 27 February 1913, Frederick Page continued
to live in Charlottesville, and he became, as an article
in the Alumni News expressed it, “one of the most familiar
figures of the past generation of students.” His wife had
died in 1867, and he had in 1883 married Lucy Cook Beale
of Fredericksburg, a sister of the wife of Professor Dunnington
of the University Faculty. She died in 1897. Page married
a third time in 1902. His third wife, Lucy White Bryan
of Memphis, Tennessee, survived him. There were seven
children by the first marriage, but none by the second and
third. In view of the lack of library aids that so sorely handicapped
service after the Rotunda fire, there has been
peculiar appropriateness in the establishment in 1947 by
his youngest child, Miss Mildred Page, of a fund in his
memory, the income to be used for the purchase of books
on librarianship and its techniques.