University of Virginia Library

9. JOHN SHELTON PATTON (1857–1932)
Librarian 1903–1927

Of these nine Librarians of the first hundred years, eight
had to do with the first university library collection, before
the burning of the Rotunda. Frederick Page knew that
collection in its latest and fullest form. He also saw the
beginning of the second and present-day collection. But it
was the ninth of the group, John Shelton Patton, whose
concern was exclusively with the new collection. In this
respect he stood alone.

He was like the other eight, however, in being a native
of Virginia, and like them he had been a student at the
University of Virginia. Patton was born in Augusta County,
near Staunton, on 10 January 1857. His father lost his life
as a soldier in the Confederate Army, and the boy was cared
for by a devoted aunt. He attended schools in Waynesboro
and Charlottesville, and was a student at the University of

Virginia for three sessions, 1877–1880. In 1881 he married
Beatrice Faber and moved to Salem, Virginia, where he
became editor of the Roanoke Times, a newspaper which
opposed the Readjuster Party. Two years later he returned
to Charlottesville to take an editorial position on the Jeffersonian
Republican. Connection with that newspaper
continued until 1894, when Patton, who had meantime
served as a member of the City Council, became Mayor of
Charlottesville. At the close of his term as Mayor, in 1896,
he joined with James H. Lindsay, under the firm name of
Lindsay and Patton, to take over the publication of the
Daily Progress, which had absorbed the Jeffersonian Republican.
In March 1899, however, Patton terminated active
connection with newspaper publishing and entered the employment
of the University of Virginia. For several years
he had been a member of the Charlottesville School
Board, and during the early part of his connection with the
University he was Superintendent of the City Schools. His
first post at the University appears to have been in connection
with an advertising committee formed by the Board of
Visitors after the burning of the Rotunda. He was also for
a year or so Secretary of the General Alumni Association.
Then came the appointment as Assistant Librarian, followed
a year later by Patton's succession to the librarianship.
He was then forty-six years of age.

In the historical sketch of the University Library details
have been given concerning the main products of Patton's
twenty-four years in the library vocation—the augmented
importance of the position of Librarian, the development
of a Library Staff, the extension in amount and in forms of
service, the growth and diffusion of the collections, the
new attack on the problems of classification and cataloguing,
and the emphasis on needs, particularly the need of a
new library building. The unavoidable emphasis on needs
dimmed the enthusiasm which marked the library effort

at the beginning of President Alderman's administration,
and, as no Alladin's lamp could be discovered, the later of
the twenty-four years tended to be a dulled maintenance of
an unsatisfactory status quo. But Patton's previous experience
as a writer and as a civic leader afforded outlets for
effort and relief from confining routine throughout his
librarianship; and to complete the story of his career there
should be some record of the impressive by-products from
these avocations of his.

He was recognized as a leading citizen of Charlottesville,
and his counsel continued to be sought in civic affairs. He
served as a member of the Board of Appointments for the
Miller Manual Labor School of Albemarle County, he was
a trustee of the Charlottesville Home for the Aged, and
when Charlottesville acquired a Public Library through the
generosity of Paul Goodloe McIntire, Patton was for a term
Chairman of its Board of Trustees.

His entrance into the library field naturally brought
into play the habits acquired as a reporter and editorial
writer. His first library efforts were to try to bring order
out of the confused conditions still prevailing in the
Rotunda. Herein was the material for the summer quarter
courses in Library Methods and also for a group of lectures
on general library subjects which he offered through the
University's Extension Division. He found congenial
occupation in the preparation of library reports, in the
establishment of a library bulletin, in the composition of a
library handbook, and in the compilation of bibliographical
data.

Such activities were by no means limited to library
subjects. He was a member of the Editorial Committee of
the Alumni Bulletin from 1913 until that publication was
discontinued in 1924. To it he contributed over a score of
signed articles on such diverse subjects as the Old Swan
Tavern, John S. Mosby, George Rogers Clark, Thomas

Jefferson's Contributions to Natural Science, and the University
of Virginia in the [First] World War. Scattering
articles of his appeared also in other publications and in
his old newspaper, the Charlottesville Daily Progress.

There are also a half dozen books bearing his name as
author or editor. Early in his connection with the University,
before he became Librarian, he and Sallie J. Doswell
had compiled the useful handbook, The University of Virginia:
Glimpses of its Past and Present. That was in 1900.
A second and much altered edition of this, with a third
collaborator, Lewis D. Crenshaw, was issued in 1915 with
a new title, Jefferson's University: Glimpses of the Past
and Present of the University of Virginia. Patton's history
of the University, Jefferson, Cabell and the University of
Virginia, was published in 1906. Three years later he was
associated with Professor Charles William Kent in editing
the volume entitled The Book of the Poe Centenary. The
Poems of John R. Thompson: with a Biographical Introduction,
which was published by Scribner in 1920, was
perhaps his most important literary contribution. It
received highly favorable reviews by Dean John Calvin
Metcalf and Historian Philip Alexander Bruce. In 1925
he collaborated again with Sallie J. Doswell in a book on
Monticello and its Master. A revised edition of this
appeared in 1930. In the year of his retirement as Librarian,
1927, sundry poems of his were collected and issued with
the title, Love and Mistress Annabel and Other Verses.

His career as Librarian extended two years into the
second century of the Library's history. The Virginia State
Law had by that time made retirement compulsory at the
age of three score and ten. This law had not previously been
in force, so that Frederick Page had remained Librarian
until he was seventy-seven and William Wertenbaker until
he was eighty-four. Patton continued to live in Charlottesville,
not far from the University, until his death 1 October

1932. He had been appointed Librarian in the year before
Doctor Alderman became President of the University. He
passed away in the year after Alderman's death. Both at
the time of Patton's retirement and at the time of his death,
resolutions commending his efforts were voted by the Board
of Visitors. In the former, Patton's services to the University
Library were fittingly described as having been rendered
“with devotion, high purposes, and good results.”

The Alderman Library viewed from a plane