University of Virginia Library

VI
The First Quarter
of the Second Century

1925–1950

1. GRAPHS OF THE UNIVERSITY AND THE
LIBRARY

THE QUARTER CENTURY that began the second
hundred years of the University of Virginia
was close-packed with an exhausting succession of
economic and political events: an extravagant
boom in the United States, a worldwide financial depression,
a global war, and an aftermath in which hope of peace
faded before an ideological struggle between fundamentally
opposed conceptions of the rights of man. The University
of Virginia, like other institutions of higher learning, was
a microcosm reflecting those changes. The closing years of
President Alderman's administration proved to be a harvest
time for material growth. His sudden death in 1931
spared him from a financial winter in which his friend and
successor, John Lloyd Newcomb, strained the powers of
the human spirit in the effort to conserve. Against the foundation
thus preserved swept the tornado of the second world
war, turning the University once more into a training
camp. Discerning statesmanship, the salutary effect of which
may become increasingly evident in the decades to follow,

saved the benefits of education for that wartime generation
of American youth, and, on the cessation of the
fighting, flooded the Universities with students notably
above the average in maturity and diligence. When President
Newcomb retired in 1947, his successor, Colgate
Whitehead Darden, Jr., the third President of the University,
continued the development of the material resources
of the University, with the aim of a more adequate girding
for concentration on the primary functions of a State
University; namely, to preserve the people's heritage and to
contribute to the advancement and the diffusion of knowledge,
with steadfast belief, in the familiar Jeffersonian
words, that enlightenment of the people and the quickening
of its hostility to every form of tyranny are essential for
the preservation of free government and human liberty.

The story of library development through this quarter
of a century differs from the story of the first hundred years.
In the first hundred years, the Library, after a promising
start, fell into a minor role; and the graph of its progress
follows closely the rise and fall in the fortunes of the University.
By contrast, in the twenty-five years from 1925 to
1950 the university and the library developments were
not parallel. A graph of the University's history for those
years would somewhat resemble the fluctuating register of
earth tremors on a seismograph; while a graph of library
development would take the form of a steady and accelerating
curve upward. The University's first decade of boom
altitudes followed by valleys of financial retrenchment was
for the Library a period of lowly struggle over a consistently
rough course. There did emerge, however, an early gleam
of hope. Then, while the University was still plunged in
the depths of the economic depression, that first essential for
the betterment of the library service, a new building for
the general library, was secured. Thereafter, through the
shooting war and the cold war, the course of the University

remained variable, but with an upturn at the close. As for
the Library, though there were delays and disappointments,
its progress continued resolutely towards something like
the combined undergraduate and research service that was
the goal. By 1950, therefore, the University Library was at
long last beginning to resume the stature which Jefferson's
vision and personal efforts had established for it in 1825.

The telling of the story of this quarter of a century also
takes a different form. The earlier record is an historical
sketch, written from the outside. In this last section, the
writer himself had a part in the action, and there is
unavoidably a subjective approach—the story tends to be a
report rather than a history. Perhaps the most visible indication
that this is a personal narrative is in the frequent
manifestation of the tenth Librarian's pride in his associates.
The confession of this pride is made to the reader at
the outset of this sixth section, not in apology, but as an
early clue to the chief cause of such success as has attended
this quarter century of effort.

2. BEGINNINGS OF REORGANIZATION

The foregoing are general statements. Now, as a radio
commentator might say, for some of the details. The 101st
session of the University of Virginia began in 1925. There
were then, including the Law Librarian, seven full time
members of the Library Staffs; and in the general library in
the Rotunda and in the thirteen separate collections scattered
among the university buildings there was a reported
total of 131,422 volumes. With the exception of the 17,194
which had survived the fire of 1895, this was a new collection
which had been assembled in thirty years.

John Shelton Patton continued to be Librarian through
two years of the second century. During that biennium
there was little alteration in the status quo of the years

immediately preceding. There was completion of the process
of taking over the northwest wing of the Rotunda
building as a stack and reading room for periodicals; from
James Reese McKeldin came an endowment fund of $1,000
for books in Philosophy; an additional $1,000 for the
Education Library was received from Alfred William
Erickson; the Thomas Carroll Smith Memorial Endowment
Fund of $10,000 was established for the Law Library; and
1926 saw the beginning of the Institute for Research in the
Social Sciences, organized and headed by Professor Wilson
Gee. That Institute had significance for library development
because of the argumented emphasis on research and
because of the effective cooperation between Professor Gee
and the University Library in matters of common concern.

Meantime, as a step toward an expanded library programme,
Dean Metcalf, Chairman of the Faculty Library
Committee, had turned his attention to the selection of a
successor to Librarian Patton. It was deemed wise this time
to choose someone with previous library experience. Jefferson's
conception of the Librarian as a guardian and a
guide was, in fact, being broadened to include the Librarian
as an administrator. The choice would naturally have fallen
on an alumnus of the University of Virginia, as it had in all
previous cases. But librarianship as a vocation appeared to
have been singularly lacking in appeal to the University's
graduates. It therefore seemed necessary to widen the field
of search. Chairman Metcalf's own realization of the difficulties
in the situation that the new Librarian must face
was sharpened by the unwillingness of several of those who
were under favorable consideration to undertake the task.
Actually it was not until the month after Librarian Patton's
retirement that the new appointment was made; and then,
after the century of ingrowing selections, the choice went
amusingly far afield. For it fell on Harry Clemons, who
had been Librarian of the missionary University of Nanking

in China until March of that year, 1927, when a Russian-induced
civil uprising had led to the historic “Nanking
Incident” and had made necessary the evacuation of
Americans from that section of China. Chairman Metcalf
learned of the possible availability of the Nanking Librarian,
arranged for a conference as soon as the latter returned
to the United States, and the appointment was made by
President Alderman early in July, with approval somewhat
later by the Board of Visitors.

The new Librarian, wishing to enroll in a refresher
course in Library Administration at Columbia University
that summer (a course conducted by that Solon among
Librarians, Azariah Root of Oberlin College), did not take
office until September, Miss Dinwiddie, the Assistant Librarian,
being in charge during the intervening months. In
addition to this special library course at Columbia, the tenth
Librarian in the series had had academic training at Wesleyan,
Princeton, and Oxford Universities and library and
teaching experience at Wesleyan, Princeton, and Nanking.
During the first world war he had been the official representative
of the American Library Association in charge of
the library war service for the American Expeditionary
Force in Siberia; and for a brief period he had been connected
with the Chinese Section of the Library of Congress.
It would appear to have been a daring gamble on the part of
President Alderman and Chairman Metcalf to interpret
such types of experience as applicable to the situation at
the University of Virginia.

The obvious first moves for the newcomer were to
familiarize himself as rapidly as possible with the details
of the situation, to coordinate his efforts with those of the
small Staff which had been loyally maintaining the service
schedules, and to develop his own planning in harmony
with the purposes and policies of the Faculty Library
Committee. In his first report, covering the last four months

of 1927, there is record of several minor moves that would
not impede a service in operation, of a listing of the
accumulation of unfinished tasks, of an increase in the
cataloguing force, and of an extension of the hours of
opening from forty-nine to eighty-four a week. The actual
addition to the hours of opening had, however, been less
extensive than the figures indicated. In the previous session
a small group of students, headed by Joseph Lee Vaughan
and Hubert Douglas Bennett, had been permitted to keep
the library room open at night without pay, and such
volunteer hours had not been included in the official figures.
An early move of the new Librarian had been to arrange
for salary compensation for this public-spirited service.

As for the actual extent of the University's holdings, a
shelf by shelf count had been made of all library books in
any way available in any building of the University. The
total of this census, 151,333, did not include sundry
unopened boxes of gifts or the motley aggregation of
unprocessed volumes that covered the floor of the top
gallery of the Rotunda. As there had been additions during
the biennium 1925 to 1927, this total indicated the approximate
correctness of the figure, 131,422, reported in 1925.

The increase in the Cataloguing Staff made it possible
to give immediate attention to the century-old problem
of cataloguing. In order that this might proceed as wisely
as possible, half hour daily conferences of the Cataloguers
were instituted; and it is doubtful if the four volume
Survey of Libraries in the United States, which had been
published by the American Library Association the previous
year, proved anywhere more timely than it did for
the little group in one of the first floor oval rooms in the
Rotunda which daily read aloud and, with growing confidence
and good humor and enthusiasm, discussed the problems
encountered and the solutions attempted by other
libraries.

Any glimmerings of enthusiasm were salutary. That
patience was a primary requisite in the library programme
at the University of Virginia had been and continued to
be only too plainly apparent. Yet patience and the note of
hope proved hardy, as was indicated three years later in
the opening sentence of the library report for 1930:—

The activities of the Library Staff have resembled the efforts of
a mountain climber. The path has led upward, but progress has
been increasingly hampered by the crowding in of trees and underbrush.
Occasional glimpses of a broadening prospect have stimulated
the climber to renewed exertions; and the dishevelment and
discomfort which attend such efforts have been borne with cheerfulness
because of the hope that the goal can be reached.

It proved fortunate that the advance could be by
several paths. For progress was possible on some even when
others seemed at least temporarily blocked. A new home
for the general library was essential. But there were also
the problems of cataloguing, of collection building, and of
assembling an adequate and efficient staff. None of these
four was an end in itself. But each afforded an important
means toward a fuller library service. Each will be considered
in turn.

First, however, there should be a word concerning
changes in the status of the Librarian and in the operations
of the Faculty Library Committee.

The tenth Librarian was the first to be granted faculty
rank, that of a Professor; and he became not only Secretary
of the Faculty Library Committee but also a voting member.
In the matter of initiative in library planning, Chairman
Metcalf played the part of a wise parent: first directing
the course of action, with careful explanation of the reasons
therefor; then, as indications of maturity emerged, falling
in behind as supporter and counsellor. A significant recognition
of the new role of the Librarian as an administrator
came in an invitation in October 1930 to present to the

University Senate a statement of the library situation and
of proposed plans for reorganization. The Senate was a new
body which had been established in 1926, its membership
consisting of ten administrative officers and of eleven representatives
elected by the Faculties of the various Departments.
The reception accorded to the Librarian by this
body was a far cry from the early attitude towards the
student Librarians.

There was a gradual change also in the operations of
the Faculty Library Committee. In course of time its function
became more exclusively the formulation of general
policies and not executive action. For several years after
1927 the responsibility for the selection of books to be
purchased, which previously had involved the committee
in its most time consuming task, had been continued. But
by common consent that function was then transferred to
an executive subcommittee composed of the Chairman
and the Librarian. In order that authoritative knowledge
of the material in each field of learning might be available,
each School or Department—there were then approximately
thirty in all—was asked to designate one of its faculty members
to act in liaison with the Librarian and to pass on
all requests for the purchase of books which might originate
in his School or Department. This large group did not
operate as a committee, and no meetings of the whole were
ever attempted. But it did afford direct access between the
Faculties and the Library; and in a number of cases it
resulted in thoroughgoing attempts at collection building
in the specified fields of learning that would have met the
approval of Mr. Jefferson.

In the intensive planning for the proposed new building,
especially in 1931 and 1938, and again in 1944 when
attention was turned to plans for an extension to that
building, the Library Committee performed much close
and careful work through subcommittees, the Chairman

and the Librarian being members of each subcommittee.
In 1942 a subcommittee composed of Dean Metcalf, who
had in 1940 been designated Chairman Emeritus of the
Faculty Library Committee, of Professor Robert Henning
Webb, the new Chairman, and of the Librarian made
an extensive survey of the library operations in order
to outline moves toward economy and efficiency, its proposals
being afterwards approved by the whole committee.

As a result of its concentration on its policy making
function, fewer meetings of the Library Committee became
necessary, but each meeting was of augmented importance.
In illustration of the actions taken, two examples may be
given, one concerning censorship, the other the policy for
acquisitions to the library collections.

Because of the nationwide agitation concerning censorship
preliminary to the second world war, the Faculty
Library Committee in December 1939

The crucial words “for research by qualified scholars” are
a signboard of the progress that had by that time been
achieved in the development of the research service of this
University Library.

The second action was the outcome of meetings held
in April 1940, one having the unique character of being a
joint session of the Faculty Library Committee with ten
representatives of the Library Staff. The matter under
consideration was the problem whether this Library should
accept and make available all obtainable books, periodicals,
pamphlets, newspapers, and manuscripts, or should adopt

a policy of selection. There was final agreement on the
following resolutions:—

It needs but a reminder of the detailed supervision of
all phases of library activity maintained by the Faculty
Library Committees of the earlier years to reveal the
contrast in the very wording of these resolutions.

This is, however, getting ahead of our story; and we
return to the four paths of progress.

3. THE ALDERMAN LIBRARY BUILDING

It will be recalled that some doubt of the adequacy of
the Rotunda for library purposes began to be whispered as
early as the comparatively prosperous days of the 1850's;
and that this had found full utterance in the years immediately
preceding the Rotunda fire. The extension of the
library space in the restoration of the Rotunda stilled those
voices for a time. But by the end of the first hundred years

they had been raised again, this time swelling to the volume
of a chorus. It is true that there persisted some opposition
to any move from the building Mr. Jefferson had planned
for the Library. To this adherence to tradition the persuasive
reply was made that, while the Founder's vision of the
University included architectural design, it was essentially
a vision of the spirit, not of bricks and mortar; and that
whenever walls should tend to become a prison, there
seemed no shadow of doubt that he would have impatiently
and resolutely led the way towards freedom.

There was still to be a tedious wait for the new building.
But now the planning for it began in earnest. Several possible
sites were considered. A wooded dell, just across the
road by the University Chapel, offered several advantages.
It was on the axis of the Rotunda and only about a hundred
and forty yards distant from it; the erection in 1929 of
Monroe Hall and of eight dormitory units and the plans
for additional construction to the westward gave assurance
that this site would be still fairly central for the University;
and the fifty-five foot dip made possible a structure which,
by extending downward from the surface level, would
achieve the needed floor space without towering above the
low Jeffersonian buildings which it would face.

When virtual agreement on this site had been reached,
thorough study was made of the present library needs of
the University and of possible future needs, as far as they
could be discerned, the whole Faculty being circularized for
ideas. Extensive records of similar investigations at Dartmouth
College and at Princeton University were secured
and carefully scanned; blue prints of new buildings at
Dartmouth and at the University of Rochester were
studied; visits were made to other Libraries; and an experimental
—and very amateur—set of specifications was drawn
up and sent for criticism to the Librarians of several institutions
which had recently erected new library buildings.

These Librarians proved most generous in giving aid, and
the replies were noteworthy for frank and constructive
criticism. Another timely library publication—James
Thayer Gerould's The College Library Building: Its Planning
and Equipment—proved particularly suggestive, especially
in the matter of equipment. The final result of many
months of effort was that a concisely stated but comprehensive
set of specifications was made ready for submission to
the future Architect of the new building.

In a double sense—both as to site and to financial history
—this was a matter of erection in a depression. In 1924,
when President Alderman “dreamed a few dreams” among
which was “a great new library costing a million dollars,”
the times were flush. So were they during the first months
of the intensive study on plans. That study, however,
stressed both needs and economy. By 1929 it was possible
for the Librarian to present to the Faculty Library Committee
a detailed report. At the close of the presentation
he was asked what all this would cost. His answer was
specific: “On the basis of cubic contents at present prices
the building will cost approximately a million dollars; and
a second million will be needed for endowment.” The
silence that ensued was suddenly broken by President Alderman,
who with a characteristic gesture removed his eyeglasses
with one hand, placed the other firmly on the table
before him, and announced: “Gentlemen, I have finished
with consideration of thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents!”

It is significant that as President Alderman's imagination
thus caught fire, it flashed back to thoughts of the
Founder. In his address before the University on Jefferson
Day, 13 April 1931, there came these ringing words:—

The need of a great library building, which by its spaciousness
and beauty may stand before the world as a symbol of the worth
and dignity of learning, is the supreme requirement of this University
at this stage of its work, on purely university levels.

Such beholding by President Alderman was not to be.
That was his last address before the University. Later that
same month, on April twenty-ninth, he died from a cerebral
hemorrhage while on his way to take part in the inaugural
ceremonies for Harry Woodburn Chase as President of
the University of Illinois. The administration of the University
of Virginia was carried on, first as Acting President
and two years later as President, by John Lloyd Newcomb,
who had been Dean of the Department of Engineering
since 1925 and Assistant to the President since 1926. President
Newcomb, like Dean Metcalf, had been among the
first to realize that a new library building was vital for the
development of the University. To that realization were
now added his loyalty to his late leader and his determination
to carry through this predominant purpose of Doctor
Alderman's latest years—it being tacitly assumed that the
proposed building should bear the name of the first President.
By his patience, undismayed persistence, and skillful
timing in this endeavor, President Newcomb revealed himself
to be of the stock of the Founder.

However, in 1931 and for several years thereafter, the
solicitation of funds from the State or from private donors
was akin to the proverbial squeezing of juice from a cork.

The world depression was at its nadir. Yet in this very
situation was found the cure, even as “out of the nettle,
danger, we pluck the flower, safety.” For in 1935 President
Newcomb proposed that appeal be made to the Federal
Emergency Agency of the Public Works Administration.
This move was promptly supported by the Faculty Library
Committee, and received the approval of the Board of
Visitors. Permission was then granted by the Governor,
George Campbell Peery, that formal petition be presented
to the Public Works Administration. That body passed
upon the project as being “economically sound and socially
desirable.” But the requirements by the Federal Government
had meantime been altered so as to remove any likelihood
of a grant for the total sum. There remained, however,
the possibility of obtaining thus a portion of the necessary
amount. President Newcomb and the Visitors thereupon
canvassed the prospects of raising the required balance. The
Rector of the Board of Visitors, Frederic William Scott,
was from eminent experience as a financier a valuable
counsellor in such proceedings. The method finally adopted
was a bond issue secured by a student library fee covering
a considerable period of years. The plan was to aim at a
total of $950,000, of which fifty-five percent or $523,000 was
to be obtained by the bond issue and forty-five percent or
$427,909 was to be requested from the Public Works
Administration. The application was made. But the operations
of that Administration were by that time beginning
to taper off, grants were being made more slowly, and the
anxiety was intensified as the prospects of success faded.

Meantime it had been necessary to take hurried action
in obtaining blueprint drawings to accompany the request.
The application to the Governor for permission to present
the petition had been illustrated by sketches of obviously
homemade variety. At that point R. E. Lee Taylor, an
alumnus of the University and the senior member of the

architectural firm of Taylor and Fisher of Baltimore, volunteered
to prepare the proper drawings. His offer was
accepted, and he was later designated as the Architect of the
new Library. That the specifications were ready for him
proved of double value: for they both helped to expedite
the Architect's work and also to insure full consideration at
this strategic moment of an interior adapted to functional
library use.

Public interest in the proposed new building had gradually
been intensified, the credit in no small measure going
to the Managing Editor, William Hillman Wranek, Jr., of
the Alumni News, and to editorial writers in various newspapers
in the State. Moreover, a searching appraisal of
American Universities by Edwin Rogers Embree in an
article in the June 1935 issue of the Atlantic Monthly had
caused acute discomfort at the University of Virginia; and
before this, in 1930, the erection of a football stadium had,
by an ironical twist, stirred a marked reaction in favor of
the library cause. In January 1936, at a largely attended
meeting of the Washington Alumni, President Newcomb
replaced the customary greetings from the University
Administration by a forceful presentation of the urgency of
the library situation. The Virginia Senators and Representatives
and other officials in Washington joined with him
in watchful waiting for a favorable moment in which to
press for action on this university project. On September
third Senator Glass and President Newcomb seized such a
moment by a vigorous presentation to Harold Ickes, Secretary
of the Interior and Administrator of Public Works. At
11:44 on the morning of Saturday, September twelfth, the
message came through that the P.W.A. grant had been
made. At 11:50 a telegram was dispatched to the Architect
in Baltimore to start full operations at top speed; and
President Newcomb then joined in an impromptu celebration
by the Library Staff under the colonnade east of the

Rotunda, at which the dignified Chairman of the Faculty
Library Committee, Dean Metcalf, gave memorable stamp
to the spirit of the occasion by executing an extraordinary
clog dance.

From this point events moved amain. The contract for
excavations on the chosen site was awarded on November
tenth, and the contract for the foundations on November
twenty-first. During 1937 and the early part of 1938 other
contracts were formally awarded, making fifteen in all, of
which twelve went to Virginia firms. It is pleasant to record
that something of the enthusiasm which was felt at the
University for this undertaking was caught by a number of
the contracting firms and their performance went beyond
the letter of their contracts. Actual work on the excavations
started late in November 1936. So did the rains—and the
next twelvemonth ranks high in the Albemarle County
records of precipitation. It proved necessary to postpone
the completion date of the construction and equipment
tasks from January to March 1938. But by April it was
possible to move into the new building.

Difficulties had meantime emerged in the issuance of the
bonds because of the wording of State laws, which were
found so to limit the sale of the bonds that they could be
purchased only by the Federal Government. But by good
fortune a special session of the Virginia Legislature had
been summoned for December 1936, and permission was
obtained that consideration of the broadening of the perti
nent act be included in the special session deliberations.
Legislative approval was thus secured, and the bonds were
successfully issued in January 1937.

The dispersion of the library collections had been augmented
during the increasingly crowded conditions from
1925 to 1938, and eight additional libraries had come into
being outside of the Rotunda, making a total of twenty-two
in seventeen other buildings—a situation that administratively

tended less to cultivation of the higher branches than
to development of the lower limbs. The problem of deciding
which collections should be moved into the new building
was carefully considered by a subcommittee of the
Faculty Library Committee in conference with each interested
group. As a result the three department libraries
(using department in the connotation customary at the
University of Virginia), Engineering, Law, and Medicine,
and ten laboratory or special collections, Astronomy, Chemistry,
Fine Arts, Geology, the Institute for Research in the
Social Sciences, Mathematics, Music, Physics, Public
Administration, and Rural Social Economics, remained outside
—though from eight of these certain classes of books
were transferred to the Alderman Library.

The actual moving required twenty-seven working days,
beginning with April twentieth and ending with May
twenty-sixth. The abundance of terraces necessitated much
carrying, and specially constructed and numbered boxes
with handles were used, so that the classification order of
the books could be preserved and volumes urgently needed
could be located at all stages. By careful organization it was
possible to keep the main reading rooms undisturbed except
for one day, May tenth; and on the eleventh the new building
was opened to readers. The first book that had been
transferred to the Alderman Library was Doctor Alderman's
memorial address on Woodrow Wilson, and this had been
proudly carried by Miss Dinwiddie, the senior member of
the Staff in length of service. When the doors were opened
on the morning of May eleventh, President Newcomb was
the first borrower, and his selection was the little volume of
Doctor Alderman's response to a toast on Virginia. There
were occasional delays in locating books during those first
days. But Miss Roy Land, the Circulation Librarian, treated
difficulty as adventure—and that spirit was transfused into
both readers and library assistants.

The formal dedication of the Alderman Library was
held on 13 June 1938 in connection with the final exercises
of the 113th session of the University. President Newcomb
made announcement of several donations, including that
of the Tracy W. McGregor Library, an acquisition of extraordinary
importance for development of research; and Dr.
Dumas Malone delivered a notable dedicatory address. Doctor
Malone was at that time Director of the Harvard University
Press. He had formerly been Editor of the Dictionary
of American Biography, and, previous to that, from
1923 to 1929, Professor of American History at the University
of Virginia. There was special fitness in his presence on
that occasion, for he was the biographer of President Alderman,
and he had, in his years at the University of Virginia,
been an active member of the Faculty Library Committee.

The new building thus dedicated and opened for use
was a massive structure with a frontage of approximately
two hundred feet and a depth of one hundred and seventy
feet. By closing the northern side, it completed the quadrangle
formed by West Range, Monroe Hall, Peabody Hall,
and the Biological Laboratory. Facing these other buildings
it was appropriately two stories in height. But the dip in
the site permitted a five story elevation on the northern
facade, and a ten story stack, there being two stack decks to
a floor. The exterior design of both the southern and the
northern facades was a three axis combination, in which a
long central mass with a moderately elevated slate roof
dominated the end wings and was joined to them by unaccented
connecting links. The east and west wings were
broken by two slightly projecting pavilions, between the
pavilions being a row of engaged columns rising from the
level of the fourth or main floor. As in the dominating type
of University of Virginia buildings, there were two exterior
colors, white for the columns, pilasters, cornices, and trim,
and a pleasingly mottled brick red for the plain wall surfaces.

Within the new structure were two light courts, somewhat
like the spaces in a thickly stemmed letter B. These
were designed to afford light and ventilation—though it
was later discovered that under a noonday summer sun they
tended to become pockets of warm air. The unusual amount
of exterior wall which resulted from these light courts had
a supplementary advantage, since there was afforded so
ample a support to the floors that the need for interior supporting
walls was thereby largely eliminated. The room
spaces could therefore be altered, as future needs might
arise, by the simple erection or removal of partitions. The
problem of future developments was also effectively met by
the rectangular shape of the new building, as contrasted
with the confining circle of the Rotunda; and along with
the original plans there were also drawn tentative plans
for a five story addition to the northward, which would
greatly extend the available floor space.

As it was, the uniformly low height of the rooms, fifteen
feet or twice the seven feet, six inches, of the standard stack
deck, gave to the Alderman Library an unusual floor area,
about 132,800 square feet, in proportion to a gross cubage
of 2,102,000 cubic feet. The effort to gain maximum space
for readers and staff and books was an outcome of the difficulties
in administering more than a score of scattered
collections. The absence of lofty, monumental effects was
also specifically planned in order that both readers and
books should be in homelike surroundings—a cardinal aim
in the planning for the new general library.

The one exception was the monumental character of the
entrance hall—a memorial to the first President. This had
the height of two stories. The entrance was at the center
of the southern facade and was therefore protected in winter
and open to the prevailing breezes of summer. (There
was only one other entrance to the building, leading into
the receiving room for materials and located at the north

end of the bottom floor of the west wing.) In the entrance
hall the comfortable chairs, the displays of new books and
of books of current interest, and the wall exhibition cases
for special and constantly varied exhibits offered welcome
to visitors. This was also a functional room, containing the
circulation desk and the public card catalogue—which was
planned to become a union catalogue for all books in possession
of the University. On the same main floor (actually
the fourth floor of the building) were located the spacious
general reading room, with a reference collection shelved
on wall cases, the general and circulation and reference
offices, a room for national and special catalogues, and a
workroom for the Preparations or Cataloguing Division.
Thus the main floor served the general reader and afforded
conveniently located headquarters for three of the five divisions
of the Staff, Preparations, Circulation, and Reference.

On the floor below were rooms largely used by students:
the reserved book reading room, a document reading room,
a browsing room, and a room for current newspapers and
magazines; there were also the offices of the extension
library services, and a special room featuring the Garnett
home library. On the quiet fifth floor above were studies
for research scholars and small seminars for graduate student
classes and conferences.

Grouped in another way, the eastern wing emphasized
reading rooms and the western wing workrooms for the
Staff. The reading room for rare books and manuscripts was
on the second floor of the east wing, directly below the
reserved book reading room; and still farther down, on the
first floor, was a photographic laboratory for microfilm and
photostatic reproductions. That equipment and the various
gadgets scattered through the building would doubtless
have intrigued Mr. Jefferson. As for the west wing, the
processing of new materials began at the receiving room on
the first floor, passed through the acquisition operations

on the second floor, and on up to the main floor. On the
receiving room floor at the bottom there was also a staff
room, furnishing equipment and comfortable conditions
for noonday lunches, for resting periods, for first aid in
case of illness, and for occasional social gatherings of the
Staff.

Other spaces within the new building—such as the series
of functional offices and workrooms, five in each of the
unaccented connecting links between the bookstack and
the wings on the northern side—have not been enumerated.
But what have been mentioned may sufficiently demonstrate
the expansion of accommodations for readers and Library
Staff—accommodations that were designed to seat comfortably
approximately 800 readers and to afford work space
for a hundred or so staff members in conditions that would
conserve strength and encourage a corresponding quality
in effort.

But the heart of the Library was, of course, the general
bookstack—a ten deck tower extending downward in the
central block of the northern side. This was a complete and
compact unit formed of rock-based foundations, concrete
floors, and a forest of steel supports. This bookstack and
supplementary shelving in various rooms in other parts of
the building afforded a total shelf space for some 600,000
volumes. Of course, when there is an expansive classification
into which additions are inserted according to subject, any
figure giving total shelf space is misleading, since some
allowance of empty shelves scattered throughout the bookstack
is essential for effective operation. It was therefore
recognized that a capacity figure for workable conditions
would prove to be not over 500,000 volumes. It should be
added that the need which Dean Metcalf had been among
the first to recognize, namely, that the University supply
research facilities for graduate students, faculty, and visiting
scholars, was in this new building met not only by the

studies and seminars on the fifth floor, and by the accommodations
of the Rare Book and Manuscript Division, but
also by one hundred carrels or cubicles lining the northern
side of the general bookstack.

Economy had been stressed in the making of the plans;
and as it turned out, the date of erection was favorable for
building costs. About 1938 prices began to be yeasty, and
it has been estimated that by 1950 the expense of erection
would have doubled. One effect of that economy was that
when the moving had been completed, all parts of the new
building were occupied. This absence of uncharted spaces
had the result of shortening the interval until further
expansion would be necessary. It had also not been sufficiently
realized how stimulating to users of the Library and
to donors of materials this impressive structure would
prove; and what seemed to be a generous allowance for
growth proved in some facilities to have been sadly underestimated.
By 1944, when the Faculty Library Committee
again found it necessary to concentrate on building plans,
on the details for the addition to the northward, the pressure
for more stack space, for more studies and carrels, for
more special rooms had again become urgent. Hence, at
the end of the first quarter of the University Library's second
hundred years, the building problem was again a serious
one. But by that time there was a clearer conception of
what a library of university caliber involved and of its
value to the University and to the whole region.

By 1950 there had also been a gain in housing and
equipment for most of the department, school, and special
collections. The Chemistry, Fine Arts, and Physics Libraries
had acquired additional shelf space, the collections for the
Institute for Research in the Social Sciences and for Rural
Social Economics had been transferred to more spacious
quarters in Minor Hall, and an attractive Nurses' Library
had been opened in one of the medical buildings. The

books of the music and public administration collections
had for the most part been transferred to the Alderman
Library, leaving a total of nine school and special collections.
The three department libraries, Engineering, Law,
and Medical, were in this period all moved into specially
designed library sections of new buildings: the Engineering
Library into Thornton Hall, occupied in 1936, the Law
Library into Clark Hall, occupied in 1932, and the Medical
Library into the medical group which was occupied in
1929. By 1950 hopes were immediate for further accommodations
for the rapidly growing law collections, and the
needs were patent for similar expansion of the engineering
and medical collections. Thus in buildings and equipment
the advance on the path of progress, for the general library
and for a majority of the separate collections, had been
greater during this period than during the entire preceding
century.

4. THE CATALOGUE

The new general library building was the first essential
for the reorganization of the library service. Essential also
was an adequate catalogue of the printed books. This was
no new problem. Of the list which Thomas Jefferson prepared
in 1825 for the use of bookdealer Hilliard, we have
earlier stated that by all counts it was a remarkable achievement.
That statement has been reiterated through the
course of this history like a musical theme; and it emerges
once more at this point. To Hilliard the Jefferson achievement
was an order list. To the University its greatest value
was as a comprehensive and authoritative selection of the
essential works in all fields of learning. To the Library
it served as a model for the printed catalogue of 1828. That
catalogue followed the list in the arrangement by subjects
according to the Bacon-Jefferson system of classification. It

was thus virtually a shelf list. So also was William Wertenbaker's
remarkable memory. The compiler of the 1828
catalogue and a wholehearted admirer of the Founder, he
loyally kept that classification in use by shelving new books
according to its subjects. In the 1850's Librarian Holcombe's
two folio volume author catalogue entered books
according to the Gildersleeve rules revised by the Visitors.
Those rules, however, affected changes in cataloguing entry,
not in classification. A succession of Librarians of brief
terms and consequently short memories immediately followed
Wertenbaker's retirement, and the cataloguing problem
again became acute. The concern now was not for
classification but for some form of cataloguing that would
serve as a finding list. Adherence to the Bacon-Jefferson
classification had been dying of inanition, and it expired
unnoticed with the destruction of a large part of the original
collection in the burning of the Rotunda. It is significant
that Librarian Patton's adoption of the Dewey Decimal
Classification is not even noted in the records.

Meantime some bibliothecal Eli Whitney had advocated
use of a three by five library card (it is diverting to imagine
Mr. Jefferson's possible reactions), and in the decades following,
library cataloguing was thereby to expand mightily
in usefulness—and in problems. In the consideration of
what was to be placed on the fair surfaces of the library
cards, the movement was to be from simplicity to elaborateness
to an involved attempt to achieve maximum utility
with minimum cost.

The use of cards at the University of Virginia Library
had started before the date of the Rotunda fire, so that the
cataloguing of the new, postfire collections was uniform in
that respect. In other respects it was not so uniform. The
earlier cataloguing illustrated the stage of simplicity—some
of it had been very simple indeed. As later entries grew
more elaborate, the contrast became glaring. By the beginning

of the Library's second century, Librarian Patton was
inaugurating a modest project of recataloguing; and his
successor therefore had the advantage of being able to
coordinate the new efforts with a process already under way.
He also had the great advantage of the enthusiasm, unaccountable
to many people, with which the little group of
Cataloguers faced their intricate tasks.

By this time, however, the idea of developing a research
as well as a college library was taking firm root. This of
course rendered desirable an arrangement of the books that
would facilitate the quests of graduate students and research
scholars who would have direct access to the shelves. To this
end, a subcommittee of the Faculty Library Committee,
Chairman Metcalf, Professor Dumas Malone, and the
Librarian being members, made a study of classification
schemes. That subcommittee recommended the adoption
of the Library of Congress classification. The recommendation
was approved by the whole committee—but with the
proviso that the change await favorable circumstances.

When that action was taken, in February 1929, the circumstances
could scarcely have been less favorable. The
Cataloguing Staff was small, the shelves at the Rotunda were
overcrowded with books, there were no special funds, and
no depository set of Library of Congress cards was available.
Moreover this meant all of the library books, and it meant
that until the change could be actually begun, all of the
present cataloguing would afterwards have to be revised.
It was a decision that required courage and a large draft on
the reserves of patience.

Encouragement came soon through several favorable
turns of fortune. Word was received that the Library at
Princeton University had discarded a set of proof sheets
of Library of Congress cards, arranged by subject. Princeton's
Librarian, James Thayer Gerould, generously presented
that set to the Library at the Rotunda. Herbert Putnam,

Librarian of Congress, being apprised of the effort at
Charlottesville, with like generosity donated all cards
printed at the Library of Congress before the distribution
of proof sheets had been started. Subscription to proof
sheets following the Princeton set came within the means
of the University of Virginia Library. The combination of
the three sources afforded well nigh a complete set of
Library of Congress cards, thus reducing time and expense
in ordering cards for cataloguing, and at the same time
supplying for research use a much needed bibliographical
tool.

The interest manifested by the Library of Congress at
the beginning continued in various effective ways throughout
this cataloguing campaign. This is a type of service to
which little publicity has been given. But the Library at
the University of Virginia can join with many another
Library in testimony that ultimate success in undertakings
of this sort has depended to no small degree on the cooperation
freely granted by the National Library in Washington.

Almost at the moment the decision was reached for
adoption, whenever the time should be deemed propitious,
of the Library of Congress classification, there was
announcement of a grant to the University of Virginia from
the General Education Board of a Humanities Fund for
the five sessions from 1930 to 1935. A portion of that fund
was allotted to the Library. This meant a real beginning
in collection building on a research basis; and several Professors
who were added to the Faculty by means of that
fund were drawn into collaboration in the ensuing book
selection. At once the proposition was strongly advanced
that if the new books were to be made speedily available,
the cost of processing them should be added to the purchase
cost; in other words, that a part of the Library's share in
that grant should be devoted to salaries for additional
Cataloguers. The acceptance of the proposition was of

strategic value then and later towards the solution of the
inherited cataloguing problem.

Advantage was taken of the resultant enlargement of
the Cataloguing Staff to segregate a small group for special
cataloguing or for recataloguing projects. The removal in
1929 of the Medical Library from one of the oval rooms on
the ground floor of the Rotunda to the new medical buildings
at “The Corner” left that room available for this special
Cataloguing Staff; and the medical collection itself was
the first unit to be handled. That and the collection on
Fine Arts, which had recently been located in Fayerweather
Hall, occupied the special staff until September 1931. Work
was then started on the Classical Library in Cabell Hall.
The work on that unit, completed in July 1933, was a
striking proof of the validity of the proposition that purchase
and cataloguing costs should be linked; for some of
the Hertz books acquired in 1895 were now for the first
time made generally available.

It should be remembered, however, that all cataloguing
was still under the divisions and symbols of the Dewey
System. It was not until 1933, four years after the decision
by the Faculty Library Committee, that a possible break
appeared in the confining wall of circumstances. That came
in the announcement one morning of a donation by William
Andrews Clark of funds for a new building for the
Department of Law, a building in which there should be
more spacious equipment for the Law Library. Within a
half hour after the announcement, request had been made
for the use, until the new general library building should
be secured and made ready, of the Law Library's vacated
space and former equipment in Minor Hall. To Minor
Hall, therefore, was moved the small special staff, to it were
transferred some of the uncatalogued gift collections, and
the strategy of a “nucleus library” was devised—a unit
catalogued in the Library of Congress classification to

become a nucleus for use in the hoped-for new building. It
was pleasantly appropriate that the first gift collection to be
handled was the private library of President Alderman,
which had been donated by Mrs. Alderman.

Work on the nucleus library began in July 1933. It was
interrupted by the cataloguing of the Lomb books on
Optics, which were acquired in 1934, and of the books of
the Engineering Library during their transfer in 1934–1935
from the Mechanical Laboratory to Thornton Hall, the
new headquarters of the Department of Engineering. When
the time came in 1938 for the Minor Hall group to move
to the Alderman Library a total of 33,972 volumes had been
catalogued, of which 24,788 were in the nucleus collection.

As soon as the new building was assured, it was estimated
that February 1937 was the earliest possible date for
the Cataloguers at the Rotunda to make their beginning in
the use of the Library of Congress classification. Thereafter
both groups of Cataloguers speeded their efforts; and at
the end of the session of 1937–1938 there were altogether
76,853 volumes in the new catalogue. It was a pursuit race,
however. For by that time the 131,422 total of 1925 had
been increased to 303,502, and the magnitude of a cataloguing
campaign on two fronts, backward and forward, had
become impressively evident. So also had the value of that
campaign. For with the new catalogue and the old filed side
by side in the entrance hall of the Alderman building, one
growing rapidly and the other more slowly shrinking in size,
it was soon observed that the use by readers was being concentrated
well nigh exclusively on the new.

This use by readers was given its rightful importance in
the cataloguing campaign. Cataloguers, intent on their task,
run some danger of coming to regard the catalogue as an
end in itself, rather than a means for the service of users.
Now it had so happened that the majority of the leaders in
this undertaking at the University of Virginia had personally

had experience in circulation work before becoming
Cataloguers. Moreover, during the strenuous first years in
the Alderman Library, when the Reference Division was
sorely undermanned, it became the practice that volunteers
from the Preparations Division should spend several hours
weekly in reference service routines. Therefore, along with
realization of the necessity of consistent maintenance of
standards, there was kept active some recognition of the
practical difficulties of a public unacquainted with cataloguing
rules.

Ever since the readings in 1927 and 1928 from the
American Library Association's Survey of Libraries in the
United States, these Cataloguers had endeavored to keep
abreast of general progress in cataloguing procedures, had
taken part in library conferences and in such experiments
as cooperative cataloguing, and had shared in the heart
searching after the publication in the October 1941 issue
of the Library Quarterly of Andrew Delbridge Osborn's
“The Crisis in Cataloguing.” During the years of the second
world war, the University of Virginia Library had the
gratification of renewing its earlier link with the Library
of Congress, based on Thomas Jefferson's part in the founding
of both libraries, by supplying safety storage for various
valuable materials from the National Library and by housing
its Union Catalogue, with its Staff. The resulting period
of direct access to the Union Catalogue, that extraordinary
asset to research, was of unique value to the University of
Virginia Cataloguers. It was also a matter of local satisfaction
that the University's cataloguing campaign enabled it
to contribute to the National Union Catalogue copies of all
its cards, including those of the Law Library. For that
statement there should be clarification on two points.

The first looks back to an action by the Faculty Library
Committee in 1928, establishing a policy of centralized
library administration, to include all collections except the

Law Library. Prior to that action a study of another American
Library Association publication, George Alan Works'
College and University Library Problems, had proved useful.
By that policy, matters of staff appointment, budget
preparation, and book selection became the joint responsibility
of the heads of the various departments or schools
concerned and the Librarian or his representative; the
acquisitions and preparations tasks were centered in the
staff of the general library; the circulation procedures were
performed by the staffs of the libraries in which the books
were located; and reference aid was supplied by the local
staffs or, when it seemed appropriate, by the reference staff
of the general library. Since the cataloguing was done by
the Preparations Division of the general library (with the
public catalogue in the general library serving as a union
catalogue for university books and with local catalogues at
the separate libraries), it could become a standard order of
business to supply cards to the National Union Catalogue.

As for the Law Library, that was benefiting immeasurably
by the vigorous and constructive interest of the Law
Alumni. In 1938 a special alumni committee, headed by
Paul Brandon Barringer, Jr., prepared a detailed and
searching report on the Law School with somewhat special
reference to its Library. That and a survey made a year
later by Elisha Riggs McConnell served as blueprints for
reorganization of the Law Library. Its collections and its
service became thereafter a focal point of concern for the
Alumni of the Department of Law. It may indeed be noted
that during the latter part of the 1925–1950 period, alumni
interest in the Law, Medical, and Engineering Libraries
and in the browsing room and international studies collections
of the Alderman Library was in striking contrast to
the widespread contention that the enthusiasm—or the criticism
—of alumni is stimulated mainly by prowess on the
playing fields.

Under this incitement from the Law Alumni, the reorganization
of the Law Library was speeded in 1942 by the
appointment of Miss Frances Farmer, a graduate in law
and the former Law Librarian of the University of Richmond,
to take charge of the cataloguing of the law collection.
On the retirement of Mrs. Graves in 1945, with a
noteworthy record of thirty-three years of service, Miss
Farmer became Law Librarian. As in the case of the general
library reorganization, some of the very difficulties of those
years were turned to favorable account. For the severe drop
in the enrollment of law students during war days resulted
in minimum use of the law books and thereby speeded the
progress of the cataloguing. By 1944 a survey of the results
by Miles Oscar Price, Librarian of the Columbia University
School of Law, brought forth a meed of hearty praise for
the results—which had produced not only a notably effective
catalogue for the Law Library in Clark Hall but also complete
representation in the combined catalogue of university
books in the Alderman Library and, with the approval
of Dean Frederick Deane Goodwin Ribble and Miss
Farmer, in the Union Catalogue at the Library of Congress.
Therefore, because the cataloguing campaigns during 1925–
1950 covered all the university books, the contribution of
the University of Virginia to the National Union Catalogue
was complete.

By the close—at least the fighting close—of the second
world war, the termination of that huge cataloguing task
was in sight. Some remnants remained, as did also the collection
of public documents and an accumulation of pamphlets.
But there was access to the documents by means of
the symbols of the Superintendent of Documents; and
pamphlet cataloguing, having run the gamut from an elaborate
and costly method, had reached the stage of an experiment
in simplified handling. Therefore the main business
of cataloguing was thereafter reduced to the processing of

current additions. The word “reduced” has reference to
the vast undertaking that had been in operation. But there
should be emphasis also on the fact that by 1950 the unending
task of handling the yearly acquisitions had itself grown
to major proportions. During the session of 1949–1950 the
number of books made accessible for use in all of the University
Libraries was 40,893. In the last year of Librarian
Wertenbaker's active service, the total collection was
reported as “about 36,000 volumes.” Thus the increase in
the single year 1949–1950 was considerably in excess of the
whole collection at the end of its first fifty-five years. Moreover
access to that earlier collection was not by the open
sesame of a library card catalogue but by the tenacious but
mortal memory of William Wertenbaker.

5. THE COLLECTIONS

That addition of 40,893 volumes during the last year of
the 1925–1950 period is proof that in collection building
also there had been progress. Thanks mainly to generosity
on the part of faculty, alumni, and many friends of the
University of Virginia, the progress had been continuous.
It had increased in the later years—the presence of the new
depository, secure and dignified, had undoubtedly given
encouragement to donors. The recorded growth during the
first five sessions of the period and during the last five
sessions strikingly reveals this. The figures are of volumes
made accessible, and include all of the university libraries.
For the sessions from 1925 to 1930 they were 4,220, 3,858,
6,113, 8,773, 8,737; for the sessions from 1945 to 1950 they
were 18,563, 23,135, 30,074, 36,597, and 40,893. It can
readily be seen that any slackening of the cataloguing task
as the over-all campaign grew to its close had been caught
up by the increase in new acquisitions.

The University of Virginia's total of 131,422 volumes in

1925 had grown to a total of 592,390 in 1950. However,
that 1950 figure by no means told the whole story. The figure
was for complete and, for the most part, bound volumes.
Such had been the method of computation maintained
throughout the previous history of the Library. Had there
been a change to the policy of enumeration by bibliographical
units—a policy adopted by a number of university
libraries during the last decade of the period—to that 1950
total there could have been added 243,404 unbound public
documents, thousands of volumes of unbound periodicals
and newspapers, and thousands of items of printed matter
in a microfilm collection which by 1950 comprised 1,553
reels.

Moreover, those figures were for printed matter. But
coincident with the emphasis on the research character of
the Library, there had been expansion in the range of the
collecting activities. In 1925 there was no record of photographs,
pictures, and prints. But by 1950 the University
Library had an available collection of 51,376 items. In
1925 there was also no record of maps. But by 1950 the
total of separate maps had reached 73,098. It will be recalled
that as early as 1825 the University had acquired the Lee
Papers. Occasional manuscripts were received and preserved
thereafter, until a census taken in 1929 revealed a
total of 2,177 pieces. By July 1950 the total had mounted
to the extraordinary figure of 3,504,100 pieces. Anyone
attempting a graph of the growth of the manuscript collection
would run the danger of a sudden loss of equilibrium.

The source of the non-book materials had almost exclusively
been gifts. As for the purchase of books, in the state
appropriations there had been a notable change from the
penury of 1925. Both President Newcomb and President
Darden had realized that special efforts were necessary in
order to regain the ground lost during the prolonged
periods of lean years that had characterized the first century

and had given earnest support to library requests for appropriation
advances, whenever such requests seemed soundly
conceived. But it had been necessary that library advances
proceed along several lines, with the result that the rate of
increase in the state appropriations for books, periodicals,
and binding had not kept abreast of the rate of increase
for other expenses.

There were valid reasons for the difference in emphasis.
One of the benefits from the Humanities Fund of 1930–1935
had been the demonstration that a part of the cost of library
books is hidden in the salary expenses for the dozen or more
processing procedures. The successful operation of the
cataloguing campaign had made expansion of the Preparations
Division necessary. As for the new building, it had not
been a charge against the State, but its servicing had
required a considerable increase in several Divisions of the
Staff. So also had the extension of the hours of opening to
ninety-eight a week, in response to demands from students
and faculty that bore gratifying testimony to the Library's
usefulness. The State Personnel Act of 1942 had affected all
Library Staffs and Divisions, and had corrected some longstanding
inequalities in salary; and alert consideration by
the General Assembly of Virginia of “white collar” difficulties
in a period of devaluation of the purchasing power
of the dollar had resulted, in the closing years of this period,
in compensating adjustments upward in the stipends of the
employees. Therefore advances in the total appropriations
to the University Library had been to a large degree the
result, partly planned and partly automatic, of higher salaries
paid to a larger staff.

However, there had not been, to any appreciable degree,
compensatory adjustments upward in purchase funds to
meet the greatly increased costs of books, periodicals, and
binding. Moreover, such state advances as there had been
had barely kept pace with the large postwar growth in

enrollment, and the advances had therefore been largely
absorbed by college library needs, by the support of undergraduate
curriculum courses. For the means to develop the
University Library as a research center, it had therefore
been necessary to depend on gifts from outside.

To legislators struggling with the complexities of the
operating budgets of a modern State, the term “research”
was liable to seem vague and intangible, especially if it be
research in the realm of the humanities and social sciences.
Even for scientific research there was a disposition to let
that be a charge on the Federal Government—it would
appear that the arguments for States' Rights were urged
with somewhat less enthusiasm at that point. Consequently,
for the Library of a State University there was likely to be
the complication of having to prove definite values without
the means to create the values—to make bricks without
straw.

Yet there were appearing, though dimly as yet, occasional
signs of a quickening realization that great issues
were involved in the effort to increase and to extend knowledge,
not only in sciences, but also in the social sciences, in
the humanities, in religion. There is a saying attributed to
President Alderman, that liberty is not an heritage but a
fresh conquest for each generation. For the generation
following the second world war this appeared to be taking
the dread form of a conquest of fear. There were mounting
attacks upon human liberty, from one direction formidable
because of their might, from another direction frightening
because of their subtlety. Even the means to oppose them
were weighted with the possibility of annihilation of both
foe and friend. In the face of such a crisis there were the
most vital reasons for the mobilization of every incentive to
a humane and sanely balanced way of life. Therefore the
State of Virginia as well as its University had reason for
gratitude to the generosity that had made possible the

beginnings and the expansion of research services by the
University Library. It had not been a mere flight of fancy
that had inspired President Alderman's appraisal of the
Library in his last words to a university audience: “The
very angels in heaven might well envy men and women
who have the power and the desire to set free the forces that
inhere in this intention.”

It is impracticable within the compass of this history to
name the thousands of men and women who responded
during these years 1925 to 1950. In view of the extended
notice that has been given to individual gifts made during
the years immediately following the Rotunda fire, the
omission of a similarly full record opens this section of the
library story to the charge of a grave deficiency, of well-nigh
invidious neglect of the new host of benefactors. It was a
host. The gifts of money for the purchase of books and
manuscripts were in these twenty-five years nearly five times
the total for the whole hundred years preceding; and the
gifts of books and manuscripts were at an even greater ratio
of increase.

But the difficulty of including individual recognition in
this historical record was largely overcome in the Library
itself. The practice had been adopted of using gift bookplates,
a number of them specially designed, for books
donated or for books purchased on donated funds. There
had been some attempt to extend the practice backward, to
include books known to have been donated in earlier years.
Thus the casual reader might discover that the book he had
chanced to open had once been a personal possession of
President Alderman or of President Newcomb, of Professor
Charles William Kent or of Professor John B. Minor, of
Bishop Collins Denny or of Walter Hines Page; or that
the book had been acquired from funds in memory of Elizabeth
Cocke Coles or of Dean Metcalf or of Peters Rushton—
or of one of the heroic students who had in the second world

war sacrificed his life for his country's freedom and for the
freedom of mankind.

Thus in the Library itself this storehouse of books
became a storehouse of associations of affection and gratitude.
The removal from the Rotunda had not made so
severe a break with the past as some had feared that it
would. Indeed, in the bookplates, and in the McGregor and
Garnett and Taylor Rooms, and in many other ways, there
had flooded in new and even deeper associations. In the
rare book section there was a modest but substantial bookcase
filled with the carefully preserved college books which
Robert Carter Berkeley had used during his student days
between 1857 and 1861. There was the family collection
assembled by Joseph Carrington Cabell, who had been
closely associated with Jefferson in the founding of the
University, and by his nephew, Nathaniel Francis Cabell.
And there was the Garnett home library, which had
remained undisturbed at “Elmwood” in Essex County,
Virginia, from the death of Muscoe Russell Hunter Garnett
in 1864 until it was moved intact in 1938 into an appropriately
furnished room in the Alderman Library. There
can be few existing examples as complete as this was of the
reading background of a leading Virginia family in the days
before the war of 1861–1865. This had also a special link
with the history of the University of Virginia Library, since
its owner, Muscoe Garnett, a graduate of both the College
and the Department of Law, had been Chairman of that
very active Library Committee of the Board of Visitors in
the prosperous 1850's. There were intimations, indeed, that
with the Garnett books had come even more unusual associations.
For to staff members, voluntarily devoting midnight

hours to the crowding tasks of that period, came fleeting
suspicions that the gentle guest of “Elmwood,” who had
for long years performed grateful returns for hospitality by
the ghostly caretaking of the books of his whilom host, had
foregathered for congenial whisperings and comradely
excursions in the halls of the new building with the book-loving
spirit of Bennett Wood Green, which had formerly
been wont to make its nightly rounds through the galleries
of the Rotunda. Here were research possibilities in the
elusive subject of the transplanting of ghosts.

But thanks to the donations received during these years,
there were research possibilities more tangible at midday.
Though the many donors of useful and attractive and valuable
general collections must go unnamed in this 1925–1950
record, there can be mention of some of those whose gifts
of books or money have had importance in supplying
research material in special subjects. It is recognized that
such discrimination among donors is unfortunate and
unfair—and this is deeply regretted. Yet this risk has been
taken in order that there may be indication of the areas in
which research possibilities had by 1950 developed in this
University Library.

Naturally the collection of photographs, pictures, and
prints became a rich mine for local history and for the history
of the University of Virginia. An acquisition of special
university interest, presented by William Hillman Wranek,
Jr., was the University Press Bureau's accumulation of
photographs, and also newspaper clippings and press releases,
covering this whole period, 1925 to 1950. An intriguing
commentary on state and national subjects of social and
political content during the same period was furnished by
the gift by the artist of the originals of the Fred O. Seibel
cartoons featured in the Richmond Times Dispatch. An
extensive collection of striking British war posters of the
second world war had been contributed by Edward Reilly

Stettinius, Jr., Lend-Lease Administrator and later Secretary
of State. A donation of outstanding value had been the
bequest by T. Catesby Jones of his collection of modern
French prints. It was with a display from those prints that
a new exhibition gallery in the passage between the
entrances to the McGregor Room and the Acquisitions
Division had been formally opened in 1949.

The map collection was likewise of research importance,
starting with Virginia and featuring such early examples as
the work of Peter Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson's father;
reaching to other States, as in the Kentucky collection
assembled by John Calvin Doolan; and extending both
backward and outward because of the interest of Tracy W.
McGregor in cosmography and early geography. The rapid
growth of the map collection after the second world war
had been greatly aided by the designation of the University
of Virginia Library as a depository of the Army Map Service.

That at the beginning of this period the concept of a
research library had not reached the stage of specific planning
and action was evident in the conventional, not to say
apathetic, attitude towards manuscripts and rare books. So
far as manuscripts were concerned, the change of attitude
was stimulated by examples of activity in neighboring States
and by outside criticisms of the comparative lethargy at
the University of Virginia. The impulses to progress are
various. Sometimes irritation is a potent persuader. It
would seem to be a fair statement concerning the start at
this time of an active programme of manuscript collecting
that several forces met in harmonious conjunction; and that
the initiative once seized was retained by consistent and
untiring effort.

The initial move towards systematic collection of manuscripts
was the preparation and distribution by first class
mail early in 1930 of 20,000 copies of a broadside written

by Professor Thornton. That this was regarded as important
was made clear by the selection of William Mynn Thornton
as its composer; and that it had the official support of the
University was emphasized by the display of six signatures:
of the President of the University, of the Rector of the
Board of Visitors, of Professor Thornton, of the senior
Professsor of History, of the Chairman of the Faculty
Library Committee, and of the Librarian. The document
earnestly called attention to the widespread destruction of
Virginia's manuscript memorials of her past—destruction by
“the devastations of war, the conflagrations of ancient
homes, the besom of the tidy housewife, and the backyard
bonfire.” It announced that the University of Virginia was
now prepared to offer its aid “in the preservation, the study,
the interpretation, and the publication of the memorials
of Virginia's social, industrial, political, and intellectual
life.”

Something like this had been implicit in Jefferson's own
interests and activities in 1825; and this pronouncement of
1930 bears interesting comparison with the magisterial
manifesto prepared by Professor Holmes in 1861. But this
time means for actual fulfillment were secured by the
appointment in 1930 of an Archivist as a library official;
and there was the good fortune that a trained historian
eminently fitted for the new position was available. Dr.
Lester J. Cappon had been Research Associate in History
in the University's Institute for Research in the Social
Sciences, and had just completed, as a monograph of that
Institute, a 900 page Bibliography of Virginia History since
1865. Through the interest of the American Council of
Learned Societies in this archival project, a grant was
secured from the Carnegie Corporation for the initiation of
the project; this was followed by effective assistance from
Professor Gee, the Director of this Research Institute at
the University of Virginia.

This archival project was fortunate also in its timing.
The years between the first and second world wars had
seen the emergence of a new viewpoint in historical
research, in which economic and social planning had
become central. Involved in the movement had been such
organizations as the American Council of Learned Societies,
the Social Science Research Council, the Public Archives
Commission of the American Historical Association, the
Public Documents Committee of the American Library
Association, and national and state archives commissions.
Developing directly out of the movement were such organizations
as the Society of American Archivists and the
American Association for State and Local History—in both
of which Doctor Cappon was to hold official positions. And
coincident with the movement came rapid advances in
microphotography. Moreover the movement proved to have
the stamina and flexibility requisite for adaptation to worldwide
warfare and economic depression.

The wording of the Thornton broadside had fitted
admirably into this national movement. Much more than
the collecting of manuscripts was involved. The full intent
of the University of Virginia project became revealed as
the programme for the Archivist came into operation. The
central purpose was to facilitate and encourage research—
to do the spade work, as it were, for historical scholarship.
Priority was to be given to a survey of the historical materials
existing in Virginia, which would serve as a guide
to research workers; accessibility was to be emphasized, as
well as preservation; and the principle of cooperation with
other agencies was to be upheld as a definite policy. As in
the national movement, the scope of the undertaking was
to be broadened by interpreting historical materials as
including every record bearing on human relationships.

In the method proposed for carrying out this programme
there was something of novelty. The plan involved

careful, on-the-spot examination of the material in each of
the State's one hundred counties. By 1935 twenty-seven
counties had been surveyed. But in that year the Historical
Records Survey, an offspring of the depression, had undertaken
a similar county by county examination for the whole
country and had thus rendered further effort of this sort
in the University of Virginia undertaking unnecessary.
However, the administrators of the national survey looked
to Doctor Cappon, as a pioneer in such a project, for counsel
and for the initial direction of their efforts in Virginia.
Again when the ominous signs of an approaching second
world war turned the attention of the new archival movement
to the collection of war materials, Doctor Cappon
was called upon to review the efforts for such collection
which had been made during the first world war and to
prepare a manual for systematic procedures during the
progress of the coming conflict. The University of Virginia
had in 1925 seemed pathetically behind it its work with
manuscripts. But when the awakening came, in 1930, it
was well timed. For a decade later, out of the University of
Virginia were coming both example and leadership.

Doctor Cappon continued as Archivist until 1945, when
he was called to another new position, that of Research
Editor for the Institute of Early American History and
Culture in Williamsburg, Virginia. He was, however,
retained on the roll of the University of Virginia Library
as Honorary Consultant in Archives—and the policy of
cooperation was thereafter emphasized by the friendly
bonds between the Williamsburg Institute and the University
Library. Like the Librarian, Doctor Cappon had not
been a graduate of the University of Virginia, his training
having been received at the University of Wisconsin and
Harvard University. But by 1945 there was a University of
Virginia alumnus, Francis Lewis Berkeley, Jr., who to a
marked degree had the desired background, the keen interest

and untiring energy, and the flair for uncovering manuscript
caches that made him an ideal successor in this library
archival position.

The actual collecting of manuscripts had thus been
linked with broader plans for service to historical scholarship.
The response to the Thornton broadside had, however,
been immediate and extensive; and later, when it
became known that the new library building afforded
safety to an unusual degree, the inflow of manuscripts
notably increased. The survey of the counties also had
resulted in the decision by many private owners of papers
to place them for safekeeping, either as gifts or as deposits,
in the University of Virginia Library. Althogether this
effort at the University met with loyal and widespread support.
It was almost exclusively a gift collection. All of the
possibilities listed by Professor Thornton—“in the garrets
and cellars and closets of old houses, in ancient mills and
storerooms and barns, on dusty book shelves, and in discarded
trunks”—all these had proved to be actual sources
of manuscript material. There were also a few cases where
valuable items had been purchased—by Clifton Waller Barrett,
by William Andrews Clark, by William Sobieski Hildreth,
by Robert Coleman Taylor, as examples—and presented
to the University Library; and in certain other cases
contributions of money had been made—by Robert Hill
Carter, Joseph Manuel Hartfield, Thomas Catesby Jones,
Cazenove Gardner Lee, as examples—in order that special
and much desired items could be acquired by purchase.
The items thus purchased formed but a small portion of
the whole manuscript collection, but they ranked high in
research value.

As covering all forms of human relationship, the range
of subjects was wide. But the geographical area was chiefly
Virginia and the southeastern States. From the beginning
the official archives of the University had constituted an

important division of the manuscript holdings. The earliest
minutes of the meetings of the Board of Visitors were in
Jefferson's own handwriting; and those immediately following
carried the autograph signatures of Jefferson and Madison
and Monroe, of Joseph Carrington Cabell and John
Hartwell Cocke. For each of those founders there were
also individual collections of letters and papers, the Jefferson
collection at the University Library numbering by 1950
well over 2,000 pieces.

In the general political field, the manuscript collection
contained papers of a number of European statesmen and
their colonial deputies, of leading figures of the Revolutionary
period, of the foremost Southern participants in the
establishment of the new nation, and of a large company
of Virginians who through the history of this Commonwealth
had made individual contributions in the service
of the State and Nation. In the literary field there were
letters and manuscripts not only of Southern writers, but
also of a rather wide range of American and English
authors. More local were the educational and philanthropic
and church records, but those contained much matter pertinent
to social studies; as did also a collection of considerable
size of business records. Family papers had been received
by gift and deposit from over three hundred families,
though by common consent genealogical research continued
to be centered in the Virginia State Library and in the
Library of the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond.

The effort to make all this material available as rapidly
as possible had placed a tremendous and exacting task upon
the Staff of the Rare Book and Manuscript Division, since
for manuscripts that Staff had to perform much of the acquisition
and all of the preparation processes as well as the
reference work for scholarly users. There had been, however,
exciting moments injected into the long hours of processing,
as when letters located in one collection were found

to be replies to letters located in another collection. A hint
of what was involved in this manuscript programme may
be given by reference to the records of the Low Moor Iron
Company, which were acquired in 1939. That business collection
covered the complete history of a company located
near Clifton Forge in Alleghany County, Virginia, from its
founding in 1873 until it ceased operations in 1930. The
records on arrival at the Library were found to weigh
approximately twelve tons. As soon as the processing procedures
could be got under way, there was assurance that
the material was of service for a study then current of the
southern iron industry. There were also incidental discoveries,
of a letter written by Calvin Coolidge in 1900, when
he was practicing law in Northampton, Massachusetts, and
of a letter written by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1918, while
he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy; and with regard to
a Connecticut-born mining engineer, William Sumner
Hungerford, who was for a time superintendent of the Low
Moor Iron Works, an interesting biographical sketch in
manuscript, written by his daughter, was found in a collection
acquired from an entirely different source.

For rare books also the beginning was with Virginia. In
1929 the southeastern wing of the Rotunda buildings
became available for library use, and it was reserved for
the books and manuscripts of a special Virginia Collection.
Miss Frances Elizabeth Harshbarger, who had been a graduate
student in History, was in charge until 1934, when she
left to become Mrs. Joseph Lee Kinzie. Under her successor,
John Cook Wyllie, to the Virginia Collection were gradually
added other rare books and manuscripts; and during the
year following the removal to the Alderman Library building,
the Herculean task was performed of searching out
and separating the rare books from the whole book collection.
In that same year were acquired the McGregor
Library and the Edward L. Stone collection, the latter

illustrative of the history of bookmaking; and to the University
Library there had in reality been added the active services
of a research center.

The addition of the McGregor Library was a highly
important factor in the research developments at the University
of Virginia. This collection came to a small library
at the moment when that library was attempting a new role.
The significance of the collection was therefore much greater
than it would have been in a library rich in such collections,
or in a library not committed to an ambitious programme.
Moreover the conditions of the gift to a notable
degree ensured its continued vitality. Altogether, this
proved to be an outstanding example of constructive benefaction.

The collection had been assembled by the late Tracy
W. McGregor of Detroit, a man aptly described by his
friend, Judge Henry Schoolcraft Hulbert, as “a quiet,
unassuming Christian gentleman with high spiritual attributes
and a great civic conscience.” One of the recognized
book collectors of his day, his private library reflected the
interests of a practical humanist concerned with freeing the
spirit of mankind and widening the boundaries of endeavor.
Limiting the field largely to material in the English language,
he specialized in English and American literature
and, more particularly, in American history. At his death
his library was left to the Trustees of McGregor Fund, a
foundation established in 1925 for the administration of
charitable and educational undertakings that would be in
accord with the spirit of his own endeavor. Carrying out
what they felt to have been his intention, the trustees,
headed by Judge Hulbert, presented the library to the University
of Virginia and, as an appropriate memorial,
equipped and furnished a portion of the rare book section
in the new building as a gentleman's library room. This
rare book collection of some 5,000 volumes (a more general

collection of fully 12,500 volumes was also presented)
afforded basic reason for extension of the Faculty and of the
graduate work in American history; the annual contribution
of $7,500 for the purchase of new material (which sum,
by agreement, was supplemented by the University to
ensure a total of $10,000 a year) was a guarantee of healthy
growth; and the establishment of an Advisory Committee,
on which the Trustees of McGregor Fund would be represented,
gave promise of their continued interest and friendly
counsel—a promise that happily attained unqualified fulfillment.

To the McGregor Fund, thus annually available, and
to the income from the Byrd Fund, was in 1939 added the
income from a fund established in memory of Elizabeth
Cocke Coles by a bequest from Walter Derossett Coles. The
McGregor Fund was for American History (with occasional
use for English and American Literature) and the Byrd
and Coles Funds were for the purchase of Virginiana. Following
a plan suggested by Dr. Thomas Perkins Abernethy,
Professor of American History, the selection of the books
and manuscripts was performed by a group composed of
the three Professors of American History, the Librarian,
and the heads of the library divisions directly concerned.
This group met fortnightly during the session, and was
thus able to combine long time planning with immediate
action whenever special opportunities for acquisition
emerged.

With books and manuscripts and other materials combined,
the research strength of the University of Virginia
Library was by 1950 outstanding for the political and social
history of the southeastern section of the United States.
This field included the material on the Negro acquired
through the opportunity offered by the James Fund, which
had been supplemented in 1925, 1928, and 1937. During
this period there were gains also in other fields of history.

The gatherings from two decades of research by the late
Raymond Gorges on the annals of the Gorges family
brought in 1943 unique material on the colonial history of
Maine. Books and funds donated by an alert and loyal
alumnus, Harcourt Parrish, broadened the possibilities of
study of Poland and of South America. A library-minded
foreign service officer of the State Department, Robert
Smith Simpson, effectively recorded the successive posts in
his diplomatic career by donating extensive assemblage of
material on Belgium, Greece, and Mexico. A memorial
fund to an aviator hero of the second world war, William
Wylie Morton, extended helpfully the acquisition of books
on Russia. The initial stimulus toward the establishment
of the Woodrow Wilson School of Foreign Affairs at the
University of Virginia was the enthusiastic response of the
Alumni to the promotion by Branch Spalding of a plan for
an International Studies Fund. The income from that fund
was later supplemented by grants from the Jesse Jones Fund
which was in 1945 donated to the Woodrow Wilson School.

The McGregor Library texts from the early geographers
and explorers have been mentioned in connection with the
map collection. These were supplemented in 1943 by a set
of fifty-five volumes of the writings of Henry Harrisse,
donated by Albert Ulman Walter, alumnus of the University
and relative of the French bibliographer and historian.
In general collections, such as those donated by Barnard
Shipp in 1903 and by William Elliott Dold in 1936, had
been found considerable material on geography and travel;
and the resulting accumulation in that field proved gratifyingly
serviceable for the wartime use by the School of
Military Government, which held its successive sessions at
the University of Virginia, and by the School of Geography,
which was a postwar development in connection with the
Woodrow Wilson School of Foreign Affairs. At the close of
the period there were being received from Dr. and Mrs.

Edward Smith Craighill Handy the beginnings of a “Far
Places Collection” which bade fair to be of both research
and popular interest, and from Mrs. Thomas Ellett the
extensive collection of her father, Colonel John Bigelow,
on the discovery of the New World and on waterways, with
emphasis on the Suez and Panama Canals.

In the subjects of Political Science and of Economics,
including Rural Social Economics, the acquisition of material
on a graduate study level had been facilitated by grants
from the General Education Board during the years from
1937 to 1943. Political Science had been aided also by
books from the private libraries of Henry Harford Cumming,
Jr., and Bruce Williams, both of whom had been
members of the Faculty of Political Science at the University
of Virginia, and from the library of William Franklin
Willoughby, Director of the Institute for Government Research
in Washington. Economics had also profited from a
book fund raised by student enterprise during the years
from 1929 to 1947.

Reference has earlier been made to the aid rendered in
book selection during this period by the faculty members
chosen by the Schools and Departments to act in liaison
with the Library, both for approval of current requests and
for long time planning. Among those outstanding for such
services were Duncan Clark Hyde, Professor of Economics,
and Albert George Adam Balz, Corcoran Professor of Philosophy.
Gifts to Philosophy had been moderate in amount,
including endowment funds established by James Reese
McKeldin in 1925 and by Professor Balz in 1950 and books
coming from the private library of Professor Albert Lefevre
in 1929. But the planned programme, though having to
proceed slowly, was producing research possibilities by the
end of this period.

In the general field of Language and Literature, the
range by 1950 was from meagre holdings in Oriental subjects

to collections of distinction in English and American
Literature. There has already been mention of the donations
of literary manuscripts. Gifts of money and of books
had also been received. Memorial funds had been contributed
for John Calvin Metcalf, long time Chairman of the
Faculty Library Committee, and for Urban Joseph Peters
Rushton, whose inspiring services as teacher and administrator
had been terminated by his untimely death in 1949.
Professor Rushton had himself, with characteristic impulses
of gratitude and affection, created funds in memory of
Asher Hinds, a former teacher of his at Princeton, and of
Donald Randolph Reed, a student of his whose life had been
lost during World War II. The Rushton gifts and the memorial
to him emphasized the subject of Literary Criticism.
Another Professor, Herman Patrick Johnson, had contributed
money for the purchase of eighteenth century English
works; and from an alumnus, Clifton Waller Barrett, whose
generous gifts to the Library of his University carried the
savor of his own sensitive appreciation of fineness in literature,
had been coming, beginning in 1946, donations
towards the acquisition of O. Henry material, and towards
a Barrett literary manuscript collection. Meantime,
throughout this period the Tunstall endowment for Poetry,
established in 1919, had proved of continuing value. As for
contributions of books, several had been outstanding. The
Sadleir-Black collection in Gothic Fiction, presented by
Robert Kerr Black in 1942 and supplemented later by him
and by Linton Reynolds Massey, afforded exceptional
opportunity for research in that tempting field. In addition
to the Ingram material on Edgar Allan Poe acquired in
1921, Mr. Barrett had begun contributions to a Poe collection
that would bring appropriate distinction to the Library
of which the student Poe had made use. A choice group of
T. S. Eliot items had been bequeathed in 1936 by another
alumnus, David Schwab. The McGregor Library included
valuable editions scattered through the whole field of English
and American Literature; and so also had gifts from
Clifton Waller Barrett, Samuel Merrifield Bemiss, William
Andrews Clark, Mrs. Robert Coleman Taylor, and Henry
Trautmann. Mrs. Taylor's collection, which, like the Garnett
Library, was housed in a separate room, displayed the
annals of American fiction. It consisted of several leading
examples for each year from colonial times to the present.

In addition to its books and manuscripts, this Library
had been one of a group of fourteen American libraries
which in 1936 began subscription to microfilm reproductions
of works printed in English or in England before 1550
—a cooperative project devised to ensure preservation and
availability of research material. This project was later
extended in scope; and its value was more acutely realized
as the originals came under the dangers of the second world
war bombing raids.

The grant by the General Education Board of the so-called
Humanities Fund during the five sessions from 1930
to 1935 permitted systematic acquisition of material on a
graduate study and research basis in English, Germanic,
and Romance Philology and in Classical Archaeology, the
congenial work of selection benefiting from the trained
judgments of Professors Archibald Anderson Hill, Frederic
Turnbull Wood, Earl Godfrey Mellor, Alexander David
Fraser, and of Professor Joseph Médard Carrière, who
joined the Faculty in 1942. Gifts of books in French had
come from the private collections of Algernon Coleman,
Professor at the University of Chicago, and of Richard
Henry Wilson, who was Professor at the University of Virginia
from 1899 to 1940; and in German from the working
library of William Harrison Faulkner, who had served on
the Faculty of the University of Virginia for an equally
long term, from 1902 to 1944. In 1946 Mrs. Henry Waldo
Greenough donated money for the purchase of books in

Italian. The favorable start towards new collections in
Greek and Latin which acquisition of the Hertz and Price
books had given shortly after the burning of the Rotunda
was followed by a lean period. But after 1925 the classical
holdings benefited from the bequest of his private library
by William Gwathmey Manly, Professor of Latin at the
University of Missouri, and by books on classical topics
which had belonged to William Elisha Peters, Professor of
Latin at the University of Virginia from 1865 to 1902. At
the close of this 1925–1950 period, endowment funds in
honor of Walter Alexander Montgomery, Professor of
Latin, and of Robert Henning Webb, Professor of Greek,
were about to become available. As for the material in
Archaeology, carefully chosen by Professor Fraser in his use
of the Humanities Fund, that had been supplemented in
1932 and 1944 by donations from David Randall-MacIver.

There had been a place for the study of Architecture
in Jefferson's conception of the education needed for the
youth of the new nation. In the erection of the buildings
enclosing the central lawn he had achieved illustrations for
such a course. But he got the pictures without the print, for
it proved too early for this idea to be accepted. There is a
hint, however, that his desire to have Architecture and Art
included in the curriculum was well enough and favorably
enough known to make it seem possible that there would
be an early addition of a “School” in those subjects. When
the Library's printed catalogue appeared in 1828, its first
twenty-seven sections were all of subjects which would fit
into the studies of the eight original “Schools.” Into its
twenty-ninth section, as a miscellany, were compressed Jefferson's
original classification chapters thirty-one through
forty-two—and the compilers would seem to have been
justified if they deemed that the material in that miscellany
would not for some time be likely to come within curriculum
range. But immediately following the curriculum

sections, one to twenty-seven, and immediately before the
non-curriculum miscellany, section twenty-nine, was a
section, twenty-eight, for Architecture, Designing, Painting,
Sculpture, and Music. The forty-three titles, 102 volumes,
of this section thus separated would on the library shelves
be conveniently located together for use for a new School
of Art and Architecture and Music.

As it turned out, this foresight was rather far sight. The
charter for the University was granted in 1819. Exactly one
hundred years later, in 1919, the creative interest of Paul
Goodloe McIntire led to the establishment of Schools of
Fine Arts and of Music, both of which were to bear this
generous donor's name. The books in that twenty-eighth
section had been lost in the flames; and by 1919 the general
library was too cramped, both in space and in funds, to give
more than casual support to the new “Schools.” But by
1925 a start had been made, on equipment funds donated
by Mr. McIntire, to form separate laboratory libraries for
both Schools. A grant from the Carnegie Corporation in
the session of 1927–1928 enabled Professors Edmund
Schureman Campbell for Art and Architecture and Arthur
Fickenscher for Music to add effective depth to the two
collections. Research material had of course been sought
in fine arts topics relating to Thomas Jefferson's own interests
and achievements. Valuable additions were later made
in special subjects; for example, by books donated by
Thomas Catesby Jones to supplement his collection of
French prints; and by the acquisition of the Alexander
McKay Smith collection of Eighteenth Century Chamber
Music. In fact by 1938 in the American Library Association
publication Resources of Southern Libraries, edited by
Robert Bingham Downs, it was stated that probably the
best rounded collection of Musicology in the South was at
the University of Virginia.

But if Mr. Jefferson a hundred years later would have

found the gathering of books in the Fine Arts to be proceeding
as he had planned, he would have been somewhat
puzzled by the gathering of books on Education as a separate
subject. In the forty-two chapters of the final form of
his classification system there was none which bore the subject
heading Education. When Jefferson wrote on that subject,
he was considering education as a whole, not as one of
the parts. It is curious, though it is probably of no very
great significance, that the heading Education made an
appearance in that 1828 catalogue of the University of Virginia
Library, printed two years after Jefferson's death—and
that it appeared in connection with that twenty-ninth miscellany
section. For that polygenous section bore the title
“Miscellaneous, including Poetry, Rhetoric, Education,
&c.” How had the student-librarian compiler (his major
subject of study was Law) and his two supervisors, the Professor
of Mathematics and the Professor of Medicine, hit
upon that use of the word?

Altogether there were 393 titles listed in that Miscellany.
Of those only four carried the word Education. One
was a copy, presented by the author, of a “Discourse on
Popular Education” delivered by Charles Fenton Mercer
before the American Whig and Cliosophic Societies at
Princeton University in September 1826, two months after
Jefferson's death. The other three were works in German.
Since in the 1828 catalogue all titles in foreign languages
were translated into English, a glance at the three German
originals reveals that the inclusion in each of some form of
the word Erziehen evidently led the compiler to enter “On
Education” as a convenient simplification of the whole
titles. As a matter of fact, none of the three was an educational
treatise in the twentieth century manner. One may
venture the guess, therefore, that convenience was the
simple cause of this rather extreme case of synecdochism—
of using a word that had proved handy in the translation

of three titles for a whole section of 393 titles. Unlike Jefferson's
proposition for a curriculum course in Architecture,
this 1828 use of the term Education would appear to
be of little historical significance.

Like Thomas Jefferson, President Alderman was a crusader
for education. Their goals were the same, but there
was some difference in technique. It was at the time of the
inauguration of President Alderman in 1905 that the formation
of the Curry Memorial School of Education was
announced; and it was in 1920 after the death of the first
Professor of Education, William Harry Heck, that the
gift of his private library made possible the establishment
of an Education Library. That excellent working collection
continued to be the nucleus of the separate material on
Education. In the next thirty years moderate growth was
aided by donations of funds by Alfred William Erickson
and by the educational fraternity Phi Delta Kappa. Gifts
of material of research possibilities had come from James
Gibson Johnson, long time Superintendent of the Charlottesville
Public Schools, from Reaumur Coleman
Stearnes, a former Superintendent of Public Instruction in
Virginia, and from Joseph Dupuy Eggleston, who was in
turn Virginia's Superintendent of Public Instruction, President
of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, and President of
Hampden-Sydney College.

It will have been noted that the story of the Law
Library has been one of a good measure of state and alumni
support and of favorable fortune. That it had got off to an
excellent start was revealed in the 1828 catalogue, the books
in law numbering more than in any other single subject. In
the later periods, when library appropriations from state
funds were running dry, there had been usually at least a
trickle for law books; and when the streams were filling up,
as in the last decade of the 1925–1950 period, the alert law
alumni were ready with effective measures for irrigation.

Moreover, the law collection alone has had an uninterrupted
history, since it escaped destruction by the Rotunda
fire. In 1925 the law collection contained over 20,000
volumes. Its increase in the next twenty-five years was more
than fourfold, the total in 1950 being 88,635 volumes; and
the indications were that a figure of six digits would soon
be reached. Since a large proportion of the volumes in a law
library is in series which report cases, the average importance
of the volumes is more steady; and the total number
of volumes is therefore likely to be a more accurate gauge
of value that it is in the majority of subjects. On this basis
and on the basis of the cataloguing campaign and of the
expansion of the library services, the Law Library at the
University of Virginia was in 1950 attaining a position of
preeminence in the Southern States.

In connection with the law cataloguing campaign, it
has been indicated that the Alumni had taken an active and
effective part in planning as well as in donations. But in
donations too the support was outstanding. In this period
the Burdow, Dancy-Garth, and T. C. Smith endowment
funds had been added, expendable funds had been received
from alumni subscription, the estate of James Gordon
Bohannon, the Memorial Welfare Association, H. Dent
Minor, the Raleigh Colston Minor Memorial, the Sigma
Nu Phi Fraternity, Robert Coleman Taylor, and the William
Henry White lectureship—the last to be used for a
collection on Constitutional Law. In this same period there
had been gift acquisitions of books from the private collections
of Judge Beverley Tucker Crump, John Shaw Field,
Joseph Manuel Hartfield, William Jett Lauck, John Barbee
and Raleigh Colston Minor, John Bassett Moore (as additions
to his collection on International Law), Charles B.
Samuels, and Judge George Curle Webb. There had also
come by donation manuscript material from Justice James
Clark McReynolds and from Judge John Munro Woolsey.

Law instruction had in this period been extended to include
graduate studies and research, and for those purposes the
law collection was proving to be favorably equipped.

The University of Virginia's books on Medicine, unlike
its books on Law, had practically all been acquired after the
Rotunda fire. By 1925, thirty years later, the Medical
Library was described in the University Catalogue as containing
“upwards of 7,000 volumes.” But like the Law
Library its increase in the next twenty-five years was more
than fourfold. To be specific, the number of catalogued and
available medical volumes in 1950 was 29,560. As an advantage
from location in a University, there were also accessible
to the medical faculty and students such university collections
as those in Biology, Chemistry, and Psychology, and
a considerable number of general medical books in the
Alderman Library.

Several valuable donations of medical books came to
the University of Virginia during this latest period; and
for the first time, as far as the Medical Library was concerned,
there were gifts of money, both in the form of
endowments and of expendable funds. In 1930 the important
medical library of the German physician, Dr. Adolf
Richard Henle, was acquired through funds donated by
the Department of Surgery and Gynecology. By gift came
books from the private collections of William James Crittenden,
Rudolf Wieser Holmes, Jefferson Randolph Kean,
David Russell Lyman, and Marshall John Payne; and from
an impressive number of members of the University Medical
Faculty: John Staige Davis, James Carroll Flippin,
William Hall Goodwin, Halstead Shipman Hedges, Theodore
Hough, Kenneth Fuller Maxcy, Henry Bearden Mulholland,
John Henry Neff, Lawrence Thomas Royster,
Stephen Hurt Watts, and Richard Henry Whitehead. Doctor
Watts's donation was notable for the number of rare
medical texts that were included; and he also established

an endowment fund. Other endowment funds were received
from William Evelyn Hopkins and from members of the
family of Eugene Ezra Neff as a memorial to Doctor Neff.
Beginning in 1937 the Medical Alumni, particularly those
residing in the neighborhood of New York City, made generous
annual contributions of funds. Other expendable
funds came from Miss Addie Cintra Cox, William Dandridge
Haden, Francis Henry McGovern, and Frederick
Henry Wilke.

As has been earlier pointed out, systematic and persistent
efforts had been producing gratifying results towards
completing the runs of learned journals in the field of
Chemistry and the runs of annual reports of observatories
in the field of Astronomy. In Physics a valuable special collection
in Optics was presented in 1934 in honor of Adolph
Lomb by his brother and co-collector, Henry Charles Lomb.
This collection was received through the good offices of
James Powell Cocke Southall, Professor of Physics at Columbia
University, a warm friend of the Lomb brothers and
of the University of Virginia, of which he was an alumnus.
At the time of his retirement from active teaching, Professor
Southall presented many of his own books to the University
of Virginia Library. A fund to make additions to the
Lomb Optical Collection possible was contributed by Dr.
Lincoln Milton Polan of the Zenith Optical Company and
by a group of seven other companies engaged in the manufacture
of optical instruments. In Biology two collections
of outstanding value had been received in this period. One
was of material in Ornithology, donated by Joseph Harvey
Riley, for forty-five years a member of the Staff of the
United States National Museum, a devoted scientist whose
recognized distinction far out-ran his own modest claims.
The other was a collection on Darwinian Evolution, gathered
over a long period of years by Paul Bandler Victorius, a
bookdealer, some of whose quests after missing editions

approached the excitement of detective fiction. This collection
was purchased for the University Library by an anonymous
—and very generous—donor. The University's material
in Geology, which like that in general Biology was of only
moderate strength, had been aided in 1939 by a money
contribution from Sumner Welles, then Under Secretary
of State—a pleasing example of constructive interest in
Geopolitics.

In the course of this period the University of Virginia
organized three experiment stations away from Charlottesville:
the Blandy Experimental Farm in Clarke County in
northern Virginia, the Mountain Lake Biological Station
in Giles County in southwestern Virginia, and the Seward
Forest in Brunswick County in the southeastern part of the
State. For the advanced work being conducted at those
stations books were regularly lent from the University
Library; and at the Mountain Lake station a special pamphlet
collection had been organized. At each station what
amounted to a small laboratory library had been assembled,
but these had not by 1950 been linked with the centralized
library administration. The books of Alfred Akerman, the
first Director of Seward Forest, had in 1934 been presented
to the collection in Forestry at the general library in Charlottesville.

One flourishing collection located away from Charlottesville,
a complete college library which in 1950 numbered
80,016 volumes, had come under the aegis of the University
of Virginia in 1944, as the result of an action of the General
Assembly towards the solution of the long discussed question
of the admission of women students. That question had
arisen in the 1890's, had become a controversial issue during
the administration of President Alderman, and had reached
partial settlement in 1920 when women were permitted to
attend the graduate and professional schools of the University
on the same basis as men students. The act of 1944 had

authorized the transformation of the State Teachers' College
at Fredericksburg into a coordinate liberal arts college
for women as Mary Washington College of the University
of Virginia, bringing the College officially under an
enlarged Board of Visitors, with the President of the University
designated as Chancellor. Under the alert administration
of Dr. Carrol Hunter Quenzel, who had become
Librarian in 1943, this college collection, housed in the E.
Lee Trinkle library building which had been completed
in 1941, had made rapid progress in size and efficiency.
The distance between Charlottesville and Fredericksburg
had prevented common on-campus use; and the Mary Washington
collection has not been included in the University
totals. In other ways the cooperation between these two
library centers had been close.

What had been in 1925 a small working collection of
three or four thousand volumes in Engineering had by
1950 increased to 17,079 catalogued volumes. Money
contributions by the Alumni and an endowment fund established
by Mr. Jack Chrysler in memory of his father, Walter
Percy Chrysler, and secured through the interest of Mr.
Harcourt Parrish, had been added to the Barksdale endowment
for Engineering and were facilitating further expansion.
The main lines of curriculum interest were in Chemical,
Civil, Electrical, and Mechanical Engineering, with research
undertakings in Aeronautical Engineering, Highway
Investigation, and Water Resources—a range that called for
extensive library support. The acquisition in 1950 of the
Thomas Winthrop Streeter collection on southern railways
had immediately proved of research importance. This
Streeter collection was located in the Rare Book Division
of the Alderman Library.

Coincident with the opening of the new library building
in 1938 and the coming of the McGregor gift had been
the acquisition, made possible by a grant from the Alumni

Board of Trustees, of the Edward Lee Stone collection on
the development of the printing art—volumes which, as the
special bookplate appropriately stated, “mirror the personality
of him who brought them together.”

By 1950, therefore, there had been definite advance as
a college library, in support of undergraduate instruction;
and as a research library there had emerged a score or
so of points of strength, scattered widely over the map of
learning. Something had been accomplished in the effort
to improve the facilities for productive scholarship in the
southern area of the United States; though by the test
afforded by the so-called “Farmington Plan”—that extraordinary
cooperative effort towards American acquisition
of foreign publications which was conceived by an intrepid
little group meeting in October 1942 at Farmington, Connecticut
—by that test the University of Virginia Library
was still short of the possibility of assuming any but the
meagerest share. The resolution adopted by the Faculty
Library Committee in 1940—“that the University Library
is unable to undertake unlimited acceptance of printed
and manuscript materials”—was not merely in frank realization
of the necessity for selection among acquisitions but it
was also in support of a policy of cooperative and not competitive
efforts. That resolution envisaged the elevation and
extension, as this Library's contribution to research, of several
crests rising above an adequate foundation of essential
materials in all fields, with emphasis on a thoroughly
equipped reference collection. What had already been
achieved in the high points had depended upon gifts. For
the foundation plateau and the reference material highways
there was need of greater general funds than had yet
been obtained. Of President Alderman's two millions of
dollars, one had been secured for the “great library building.”
The million for “an adequate endowment” was in
1950 still being sought.

6. THE STAFF

Thus the library effort during 1925–1950 struggled
upward by several paths: towards a general library buildng,
towards an adequate catalogue, towards a storehouse of
books that would facilitate research as well as undergraduate
studies. Yet those goals were but means, not the desired
end. It was the fourth effort, the development of a skilled
and cooperative Staff, that would most directly affect the
quality of the service that was the central purpose of this
period of reorganization. It was in this matter of a Staff
that the greatest measure of success had been achieved.

In July 1925 there had been seven full time members
and one student part time assistant in the Library Staffs.
The indications at that time were that librarianship had
been offering little appeal to graduates of the University
of Virginia. At the end of June 1950 there were sixty-six
full time members and forty-five student or other part time
assistants in the Library Staffs. Moreover all of the heads
of divisions in the general library who had received appointment
during those twenty-five years had previously been
students at the University; and all of them had at one time
or another since their appointments received tempting
offers of library positions elsewhere. The quality of technical
skill had become high, the contributions of original and
constructive ideas had been outstanding, and many letters
in the library files bore tribute to the range and spirit of
the services that had been rendered. The story of what
happened is a pleasant one. But it is too long to be told
here. Some isolated bits must suffice.

One bit has already been told—the manner in which a
small group of Cataloguers applied to a huge task the
formula of interest and patience and good cheer; and how
the opportunity afforded by the Humanities Fund had been
utilized for an early increase of that Cataloguing Staff.

Another bit appropriately began with Christmas. During

the Christmas holidays of 1928, an undergraduate, who
had been reported to the new Librarian as having capably
performed an odd job or two for the Library at the
Rotunda, was engaged to undertake one of the many special
pieces of work that then impeded the very entrance to any
paths towards progress. What that task was has been forgotten
—but not the speed, accuracy, and completeness of the
performance. It was not long before a regular part time
assistantship had been found for that student. It so happened
that he had two undergraduate friends—a sort of
Three Musketeer group. The two were intrigued by this
new occupation of their comrade, even as Tom Sawyer's
mates discovered that whitewashing a fence had unsuspected
glamor. In a few months they also were members
of the Student Library Staff. It was good fortune for the
new Librarian. For these three student assistants, being at
the same time users of the Library and workers behind the
scenes, had acquired a double point of view. Since they
were endowed with both curiosity and imagination, they
readily grasped the meaning of plans intended to make
library work yield greater dividends in library service. They
also found that their modestly ventured suggestions were
being considered and not infrequently adopted. There had
been no thought in their minds of library business as a
permanent occupation; and the full time positions that
were offered them when they graduated meant to them at
first merely a means for financing graduate study. But their
own contributions to an expanding programme tied them
to that programme by making it their own. That it was
their own needs no proof except their names. The student
who started this by working through his Christmas holidays
was John Wyllie, Curator of Rare Books and of the McGregor
Library; and his two friends were Randolph
Church, Virginia State Librarian, and Jack Dalton, eleventh
Librarian of the University of Virginia.

Another bit had only indirect effect on the permanent
Staff. But the utilization of depression means in order to
clean up the 1927 list of undone jobs had undoubted value
for morale. In 1933 federal emergency relief funds became
available for library work by students and others. Those
were the funds which helped to coin a language of abbreviations:
CWA, FERA, NYA, WPA. At the University of
Virginia they were for the most part administered by
Charles Henry Kauffmann, Director of Student Help; and
his enthusiastic support of the library undertakings made
his contribution to the reorganization programme vitally
effective. On its part, the library administration was able
to present a score or more of worthwhile projects that
demanded concentrated effort and in some cases had instructional
and apprenticeship values. From the number
employed—on the peak year there were 156 library
appointees—there was an unrivalled opportunity to select
library minded workers for regular student assistantships.
It is true that the task of training and supervising ever-changing
groups of part time workers necessarily drew
regular members of the Staff off from their routine duties;
and that an equal amount of money expended on full time
and skilled assistants might have produced more effective
results. But for the Library's clean-up jobs these emergency
funds proved a veritable gift horse. For the ten years 1933
to 1943, during which the funds were available, the records
for all the University Libraries totalled 1,119 individuals
who performed 277,081 hours of work and received
$112,730.12 in wages.

Two developments in the staff situation came from acts
of the General Assembly of Virginia which affected the
libraries of all state supported institutions. The Certification
Law, which went into operation on 1 July 1937, established
professional standards for the more responsible
library positions. This law applied also to the libraries of

Engineering, Law, and Medical Library Reading Rooms

Some Library Publications

political subdivisions exceeding 5,000 in population. It
was the result of several years of effort by the Virginia
Library Association, in which effort several members of
the Staff of the University of Virginia Library took an active
part; and on the three member State Board of Certification
for Librarians Mr. Clemons and Mr. Dalton in succession
received appointments from the Governor. Of the sixty-six
full time members of the Staffs of the University Libraries
in 1950, twenty-six had qualified for professional
status. By the State Personnel Act, which went into effect 1
July 1942, both professional and non-professional members
of Library Staffs were, along with the majority of other
employees of the State, graded for salary standards. Acting
as consultants in the matter of library grading, members of
the Staff of the University of Virginia Library had a part
in this development also. The Personnel Act did much to
solve the vexed problem of inequalities in salaries, and it
also supplied the machinery for cost-of-living adjustments
to which reference has earlier been made. Of course strict
standardization presents its own problems. But by 1950
the understanding, patience, and loyalty of the Library Staff
at the University of Virginia had won through to the reward
of a comparatively satisfactory situation, there being both
recognition of the professional status of library work and
of its appropriate compensation. There was ample cause for
the satisfaction of the University and of the State also. For
the later years had brought evidence of a widespread
impression that the Staff of the University of Virginia
Library was the peer of any in the country.

At the Alderman Library the introduction of research
services, while the functions of a college library were at
the same time being maintained, had brought about conditions
for specialization. The small Staff of 1925 had been
performing the duties pertaining to the purchase, cataloguing,
and circulation of books. As expanded, these functions

had developed into the separately organized Acquisitions,
Preparations, and Circulation Divisions. To those had, in
the 1925–1950 period, been added the Reference and Rare
Book and Manuscript Divisions, making five in all. It was
a planned development. But in a background of economic
and political crises, the growth had necessarily been opportunistic
and poorly balanced. It had been conditioned by
acute pressures at certain points and relief had come
through fortuitous circumstances. Such had been the expansion
of the Preparations Division because of the cataloguing
campaign, and of the Rare Book and Manuscript Division
because of the rapid increase of manuscripts and rare books.
It was not until toward the close of the period that there
had been adequate manning of the Acquisitions and Reference
Divisions; and further adjustments upward were
definitely on the programme for the second quarter of the
Library's second hundred years.

Partly to offset the isolation disadvantages of specialization,
it had been deemed wise, after the move into the Alderman
Library building, to create a representative body of
the Library Staffs in order that information concerning
local library activities might be made available to all. The
purpose being the spread of information, not executive
action, the meetings could be kept within time limits, committee
discussions and administrative conclusions coming
to this group merely as reports. With a touch of persiflage,
this body had been dubbed the Board of Aldermen. Its
meetings were at first held fortnightly and afterwards
monthly; and in course of time the minutes of its meetings
were made available for all members of the Library Staffs
and for the members of the Faculty Library Committee.
The Board of Aldermen thus became a sort of reportorial
body, and its minutes a bulletin of current information.

Since the individuals composing this group were carrying
the major part of the executive responsibilities of the

University of Virginia Libraries, brief personal statements
will be given concerning the personnel of the Board as
constituted at the end of this period. It seems the more
fitting that this be done because at that stage those individual
responsibilities would have compared not unfavorably
with those borne by the first nine Librarians.

The three department libraries were represented by
their Librarians, Miss Frances Farmer for the Law Library,
Miss Elizabeth Frances Adkins for the Medical Library, and
Miss Nellie Imogene Copps for the Engineering Library.

Miss Farmer held B.A. and LL.B. degrees from the University
of Richmond, where she had been Law Librarian
prior to her appointment in 1942 as Executive Secretary
of the Law Library Committee at the University of Virginia.
In the latter position she had organized and supervised
the cataloguing of the law collection. Becoming Law
Librarian in 1945, she had extended the usefulness of the
Law Library by offering reference and other services to the
alumni and to the legal profession in general. She had, for
example, arranged for the cataloguing of the State Law
Library in Richmond. She had also taken over the instruction
in the required course in Legal Bibliography, the
manual for that course having as joint authors Miss Farmer
and Judge Malcolm Ray Doubles. She was a member of
various legal societies, and was Secretary of the American
Association of Law Librarians.

Miss Adkins had been a college student at Hollins College
and the University of Virginia, and held a B.S. degree
from the University of Virginia and a B.A. in Library Science
from the University of North Carolina. Prior to becoming
Medical Librarian in 1947, she had had a varied experience;
as a high school librarian in Alexandria, Virginia, as
assistant in a legislative reference library in Baltimore, as a
cataloguer at the University of Virginia and at the University
of North Carolina, at the latter being in charge of

Latin American materials, and as a war service librarian
at Fort Monroe, Virginia.

By way of an aside, it may be noted that, while Miss
Farmer had been preceded as Law Librarian by Mrs.
Graves who had a notably long term of service, extending
from 1912 to 1945, and while Miss Copps had been the
first to hold the post of Engineering Librarian as a full
time position, there had been eight Medical Librarians
between the removal of that Library from the Rotunda to
the new medical buildings in 1929 and the appointment
of Miss Adkins. The eight had been Mrs. Margaret Otto,
Mrs. Anne Ashhurst Gwathmey, Miss Caroline Hill Davis
(formerly of the Columbia University Library), Mrs. Dora
Mitchell Browning, Mrs. Miriam Thomas Buchanan, Miss
Anne Lewis Morris, Miss Mary Elizabeth Mayo, and Miss
Mabel Cook Wyllie (sister of the Curator of the McGregor
Library). The difference at the Medical Library had arisen
from the effect of marriage upon tenure of office. Four on
that list had departed when their husbands took positions
away from Charlottesville, and three (in a row) had
resigned to become married. For clarification it should
perhaps be added that only two of the seven husbands were
doctors of medicine.

Miss Copps had taken courses at Stratford College,
Columbia, and the University of Virginia. She had become
Engineering Librarian in 1945. For a considerable period
prior to 1942 the engineering collection had been under
the supervision of Professor Charles Henderson, later to
become Dean. In 1942 Professor Edwin Claire McClintock,
Jr., had assumed the supervision; and after the appointment
of Miss Copps, he became Chairman of the Engineering
Faculty Library Committee. Miss Copps had previously
held the post of Extension Librarian in an interesting
attempt on the part of the University of Virginia to cooperate
with the Virginia State Library in giving public library

service to counties in the State where no local libraries
were available. In accordance with the understanding
when that cooperation began in 1928, as soon as the state
appropriations to the Extension Division of the State
Library seemed to be sufficient to enable that Division to
take over the entire responsibility for fiction material, the
University's part became limited to the regular service of
the Reference Division of the Alderman Library. It was
at that point that Miss Copps had been transferred to the
much needed full time post of Engineering Librarian.

The other members of the Board of Aldermen were
drawn from the Staff of the General Library.

Miss Mary Louise Dinwiddie had been a member of
the General Library Staff since 1911 and had been Assistant
Librarian since 1912. She had taken courses at the University
of Virginia, and in 1913 she had attended a summer
course in Library Science at Columbia University. Her
store of information from the past had been valuable in
phases of the clean-up job, an example being her supervision
of a squad of federal relief workers in the laborious
task of handling the accumulation of thousands of dusty
volumes strewn over the dome floor of the Rotunda. Such
services were carried over into the supervision of the
exchange and binding routines, and into the assembling,
arranging, and storing of stocks of the various university
publications. The hours spent in this last project gave
promise of a saving of time for many years after 1950, the
date of her retirement. Miss Dinwiddie had been prominent
in the activities of the Virginia Library Association; and
during World War II she had been Director for Virginia
of the collecting of books for the soldiers and sailors.

As has been noted, the major problem of cataloguing
had resulted in an increase of the Staff of the Preparations
Division somewhat out of proportion to the other Divisions.
As an early attempt to facilitate the adoption of the Library

of Congress classification by appointing as over-all supervisor
an expert Cataloguer who was retiring from the
Library of Congress had failed, because of the prolonged
illness of that expert, the four senior members of the
Cataloguing Staff had joined forces to master the problems
involved, and gradually, with generously granted counsel
from the Library of Congress, had worked out a manual
of procedure. The four consequently became known as
the Manual Committee. The Library had benefited greatly
by having the continuous services of these four during the
prolonged special cataloguing campaign. It had seemed
appropriate, therefore, that all four be members of the
Board of Aldermen, more especially since each had taken
charge of a section of the general task. The division of the
responsibility had been the result of a voluntary arrangement
by the four concerned—and it had been indicative of
the spirit that characterized that undertaking that the
selection of types of work had been along lines of interest
and recognized difficulty, not along lines of least resistance.

Mrs. Grigsby Farrar Bailey (Mrs. Thomas Dallas
Bailey) had studied at the Packer Collegiate Institute in
Brooklyn and at the Brooklyn Public Library Training
School. She had been in charge of circulation at the
Rotunda during the session of 1922–1923, had been Acting
Librarian of the Charlottesville Public Library for the
years 1923 to 1925, and had returned to the University of
Virginia Library as Cataloguer in 1926. In the later division
of the work she had elected to take charge of serial cataloguing
—and thus incidentally became one of the noble band of
contributors to the successive Union Lists of Serials.

Miss Marjorie Dunham Carver had begun her connection
with the Library in 1920 as Secretary to the Librarian
but had almost immediately been transferred to a special
position as Secretary to the General Chairman of the Centennial
Committee, a post she held for two years. In 1922

she had returned to the Library, as Secretary (until 1927)
and as Special Cataloguer. She had been placed in charge of
the recataloguing group in 1929, and it was she who had led
that group in the excursion to Minor Hall and in the
preparation of the “nucleus library.” After the moving into
the Alderman Library building, Miss Carver had continued
in charge of special cataloguing projects. One of those had
been the development of the pamphlet collection at Mountain
Lake. Early in the process of acquiring this varied
experience, Miss Carver had profited from the University's
extension courses in Library Science.

Miss Lucy Trimble Clark had taken summer courses
at the University of Virginia and had had some experience
in teaching, in the work of the University Press, and in the
circulation service of the Charlottesville Public Library
before becoming in 1924 an assistant in circulation at the
University of Virginia Library. In 1927 she had transferred
to cataloguing. Work on books for which there was no
prospect of obtaining Library of Congress printed cards
had appealed to her, and she went on to train herself in the
intricacies of rare book cataloguing, thus fitting her efforts
into the programme for developing a research library.
Appropriate recognition of her achievements had come in
her election as a member of the Council of the University
of Virginia Bibliographical Society.

Miss Olive Dickinson Clark had studied at Roanoke
College and at Sweet Briar. At the University of Virginia
Library she had started in 1923 as assistant in circulation,
and had been in charge of circulation from 1924 to 1928.
She had, however, felt the appeal of the cataloguing type
of library work and in 1928 followed her sister into what
was to become the Preparations Division. In the work of
that Division Miss Olive Clark had assumed the responsibility
for new cataloguing—that is, of books which, whatever
their date of publication, were new to the University Library,

and for which Library of Congress printed cards
were available. To her had come also the responsibility for
cataloguing the music collection.

Miss Louise Savage, the Acquisitions Librarian, had
joined the Staff in 1930. It had been an act of faith—she
had had such confidence in the probable developments at
the University of Virginia Library that to take charge of its
acquisitions duties she had at considerable financial sacrifice
left a post as Librarian and Dean of Women at Elon College
in North Carolina. Her earlier college studies had had to
be interrupted by periods of teaching—her teaching subjects
had been mathematics and science—but two years at the
Randolph Macon Woman's College and some summer
quarters at the University of Virginia had gained for her a
degree of B.S. from the latter. In 1932–1933, while on leave
from the acquisitions position, she had acquired also a B.S.
in Library Science at the George Peabody College for
Teachers in Nashville. One of the outstanding achievements
of this whole period of the Library's history had been
her successful effort during the second world war—specifically
from September 1942 through December 1945—to
carry the double responsibilities of the Acquisitions and of
the Rare Book and Manuscript Divisions. As for the Acquisitions
Division, which had been continuously in her charge
from 1930, except for the session spent in Nashville, when
Miss Bertha Cornelia Deane had capably substituted, that
Division had been developed to a notable degree in extent,
in efficiency, and in economy in the business operations of
the library administration. Miss Savage's services had meantime
been increasingly in demand from outside organizations
—library, educational, bibliographical, social, religious
—and it had been noticeable that none of the tasks for which
her aid had been sought had fitted into the classification
of sinecures. Her recreations also had been active—hunting,
fishing, gardening, and spotting air planes.

Miss Helena Craig Koiner, who was in 1950 Senior
Assistant in the Acquisitions Division, had been Secretary
to the Librarian when the meetings of the Board of Aldermen
had been started, and she had shared with Miss Carver
the secretarial duties for the Board. In 1942, at the time
when Miss Savage had taken on the rare book and manuscript
responsibilities along with those of acquisitions, Miss
Koiner had been transferred to the Acquisitions Division.
She had taken college courses at the Stonewall Jackson
College in Abingdon, Virginia, at the University of Virginia,
at Columbia University, and at the University of
North Carolina, and she had taught in Virginia, Massachusetts,
and China—a wide range of training and experience.
In 1947 she and Miss Ruth Evelyn Byrd of the Rare Book
and Manuscript Division had passed with distinction the
Virginia State Board examinations for professional library
certification.

Miss Roy Land, the Circulation Librarian, had, like
Miss Savage, joined the Staff in 1930. Also as in Miss Savage's
case, her college undergraduate work had necessarily
been interrupted by teaching. She had completed the junior
college course at Averett College in Danville, Virginia, had
had a session at Westhampton College at the University of
Richmond, and then had progressed to a B.S. degree at the
University of Virginia. It was as a graduate student that
she began part time work at the University of Virginia
Library, her early assignments being in various phases of
the library routines. Directly after gaining an M.S. degree
in English—that was in 1931—she became a full time circulation
assistant; and three years later she was promoted to
head the circulation work, following the resignation of
Miss Virginia Cloud Jacobs. The rapid extension of the
circulation services after the removal to the Alderman
Library building was under the leadership of Miss Land;
and notwithstanding the increased burden of responsibilities,

she maintained to a degree widely and favorably recognized
the quality of those services to the Library's public.
In 1942–1943 a special grant from the General Education
Board enabled her to spend a session in library study at
the University of Michigan, her post at the Alderman
Library being admirably carried by Miss Elizabeth Dillard
Waterman. At Ann Arbor Miss Land made a distinguished
record and added the degree of B.A. in Library Science to
her collection. Meantime she had interested herself in the
University's courses in dramatic art, and, particularly in
the decade from 1929 to 1939, had taken leading parts in
many of the productions of the Virginia Players. She had
also been an organizer of the Extension Division's Bureau
of School and Community Drama. That her ability as an
organizer and speaker had been widely recognized had been
evidenced by the calls upon her services by social groups
and various library and literary organizations.

From the Board of Aldermen was to come the eleventh
Librarian; and the next chapter in the history of the University
of Virginia Library, beginning with July 1950,
will be, using the Roman formula for Consuls, in the librarianship
of Jack Dalton. With Jack Preston Dalton the practice
of appointing an alumnus of the University to the
library post was to be resumed. He had begun his college
course at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, but his B.S.
and M.S. degrees had been gained at the University of
Virginia. During the four sessions from 1930 to 1934 he
had been an Instructor in English at the Virginia Polytechnic
Institute, and he had seemed well on his way to a
professorship in that subject when he was persuaded to
return to the Rotunda to succeed Randolph Warner
Church as Assistant Reference Librarian, Mr. Church moving
on to Richmond to become Assistant State Librarian.
During 1935–1936 Mr. Dalton studied Library Science at
the University of Michigan on a special grant from the

General Education Board—and thus had opportunity to
observe in Dr. William Warner Bishop how wide a range
of possibilities there could be in constructive library leadership.
During his absence at the University of Michigan, the
expanding reference services had been ably performed by
Anthony Vincent Shea, Jr., a graduate student who, unfortunately
for the library profession, was not sufficiently
attracted to make library service his life work. On Mr.
Dalton's return in 1936, his position had been given the
full title of Reference Librarian; and during the years
immediately following, Mr. Dalton had employed his
trained judgment in the selection of material appropriate
for a university reference collection. In 1942 he was promoted
to Associate Librarian, while retaining the direction
of the Reference Division; and from that date, to him had
gradually been entrusted the chief responsibility for state,
regional, and national library relationships. Another grant
from the General Education Board in 1949 had enabled
him to make a nationwide study of postwar developments
in library techniques and administration. It is doubtful
if many University Librarians on their first assumption of
that post have been equally well equipped—or have been
as capable of profiting by that equipment.

Francis Lewis Berkeley, Jr., Curator of Manuscripts
and University Archivist, had in 1945 returned from war
service to continue the various phases of the work which
had been begun by Dr. Lester J. Cappon. His postwar
activities as collector of manuscripts had been one of the
prime causes of the urgent need in 1950 of an extension of
the library building; and his creation and performance of
editorial opportunities had done much to expand the usefulness
of the manuscript collection. Previous to his enlistment
in the Navy in 1942 he had amply proved his fitness
for a type of library service that would undoubtedly have
met with the warm approval of Mr. Jefferson. He had taken

a B.S. degree at the University of Virginia in 1934 and an
M.A. in History in 1940. He had been an Assistant in
English at the University, he had taught school in Gloucester
County and in the City of Roanoke, and in the summers
of 1933 and 1934 he had come to the attention of the
library administration through his performance of the
duties of an assistant in connection with the Virginia Collection.
At the time of the removal into the new building
in 1938, Mr. Berkeley had been wooed from teaching to
become Senior Assistant in Charge of Manuscripts; and
from October 1941 to September 1942 he had served as
Acting Director of Rare Books and Manuscripts and Acting
Curator of the McGregor Library.

As for his war service, it was in the Navy and in two
parts. As Ensign and Lieutenant Junior Grade he had been
in the Naval Armed Guard, and the operations in which
he took part had penetrated into all the naval war theatres.
As Lieutenant he had been assigned to the Amphibious
Forces, and he had been in command of LSM 171 during
the later stages of the operations in the Pacific—facing
Japanese Kamikaze planes and the Fifth of June Typhoon
with equal success. After discharge from active duty in
October 1945 he had continued in the Naval Reserve and
has since then been promoted to Lieutenant Commander.

In 1950 John Cook Wyllie was Curator of Rare Books
and Curator of the McGregor Library. We have seen that
his regular connection with the University of Virginia
Library had begun during the 1928 Christmas holidays. A
concise statement is given of the steps between those two
dates. This is a factual statement. Such a record is peculiarly
inadequate, because the material for a true biography of
Mr. Wyllie would be ideas. To a limited degree it may be
possible for the reader to catch the glimmering of such part
of the story of ideas as lay behind these particular facts.

Mr. Wyllie received the B.A. degree from the University

of Virginia in June 1929. He was Assistant Reference
Librarian from 1929 to 1933. It was “Assistant” merely
because it was deemed wise to reserve the full title of Reference
Librarian until the infant Reference Division could be
more adequately developed. During 1933–1934 he was on
leave for an adventure in tramp travel in Europe, special
attention being given to libraries, binderies, and booksellers.
On his return he became Curator of the Virginia
Collection, holding that office from 1934 to 1938. Meantime
in August 1936 he attended a University of Chicago Graduate
Library School Institute, and in the summer of 1937
he did apprentice work under the master binders at the
University of Michigan and at the New York Public
Library. From 1938 to 1941 he was Director of the Rare
Book and Manuscript Division and Curator of the McGregor
Library; and during those years he virtually created
the rare book collection by an exhaustive examination,
book by book, of the collections in the general library. He
was on leave of absence for war service from 1941 to 1945.
It was when he came back at the end of 1945 that he took
his present title. During the major part of 1948 he added to
his regular duties, at the request of President Darden,
the reorganization of the University Press. He took a leading
part in the founding of the Albemarle County Historical
Society and of the University of Virginia Bibliographical
Society, and he had meanwhile been made a member of
many other organizations, including the American Antiquarian
Society. When the University of Virginia in 1948
conferred on him the Algernon Sydney Sullivan Award,
the citation tersely stated that he had

Such in 1950, together with the tenth Librarian until
his retirement on July first, was the membership of this
representative group. There had also been in existence
since 1942 a more comprehensive organization which had
included all the members of the General Library Staff. This
had delegated to a small, elected committee the arrangements
for staff gatherings, the care and improvement of
the staff room, and matters of social welfare, its financial
basis being moderate annual dues. The natural tendency
to over-organization had been successfully resisted, and
this Staff Association had done much to engender and
preserve a sense of family solidarity, which found its most
lively expression, perhaps, in the annual Christmas parties.

Through the greater part of this period members of
the Staff were also concerned, some as teachers and some as
students, with the summer quarter and extension courses in
Library Science. Such courses had been started by Librarian
Patton in 1911, Miss Dinwiddie joining him as an Instructor
in 1915. Requirements for the training of librarians in
high schools had been established by the State Board of
Education about 1928; there had consequently been a
considerable increase in the number of students, and new
courses had been added. At that time the Faculty Library
Committee had given serious consideration to the advisability
of establishing a degree-conferring Library School at
the University of Virginia. The decision had been that the
library science curriculum should be strengthened in order
that the courses might be given credit towards the B.S.
degree in Education; but that it seemed wise not to plan
for a separate school offering a degree in Library Science.

Within the limits thus set, the effort had been successful.
The courses—they had been increased to twelve by the
summer of 1934—had been granted the desired credit, and
they had been approved for teacher-librarians in high
schools by the Virginia and Pennsylvania State Boards of
Education and by the Southern Association for Colleges
and Secondary Schools.

But during the second world war the summer courses
in Library Science had quite innocently got caught in the
line of fire from two directions. The reduced supply of
teachers had compelled a relaxation of standardization requirements;
and the three months summer period between
regular sessions had been eliminated, shortening the normal
four years of college to a continuous effort of thirty-six
months and thereby crowding out a number of the customary
summer quarter subjects. Since these library courses
were thus without place and practically without students,
they had quietly been numbered among the war victims.
And when postwar action by the State Board of Education
emphasized instruction for high school teacher-librarians
at Madison College in Harrisonburg, the decision was
accepted with equanimity.

As a matter of historical record, since the General
Library had been involved in the administration of those
library science courses, a faculty list is given for the 1925–
1950 period. Miss Dinwiddie had continued as Instructor
throughout the activation of the courses. Other members of
the Staff who had offered instruction were Mr. Dalton
(1936–1943, 1945, 1947), Miss Land (1947), Miss Savage
(1931–1943, 1945, 1947), and Mr. Wyllie (1930–1932). To
the Library Science Faculty had been added, for the summers
indicated, Miss Lula Ocillee Andrews of the University
of Virginia Extension Faculty (1929, 1930), Miss
Georgia May Barrett of the University of Miami, Florida,
Faculty (1929, 1930), Mr. Randolph Warner Church of

the Virginia State Library (1933–1935), Miss Ethel Ruby
Cundiff of the Faculty of the George Peabody College for
Teachers, Nashville (1931–1933), Miss Mary Virginia
Gaver, Librarian of the George Washington High School,
Danville, Virginia (1934–1938), and Mrs. Dorothy Storey
Watson, Supervisor of School Libraries, Roanoke, Virginia
(1939–1943 and 1947).

To make the record complete, it should be added that
during the 1930's some courses were offered outside those
in the University's summer quarter. From 1931 to 1935
Miss Dinwiddie had conducted library science classes during
the regular sessions at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton,
Virginia; and in 1935–1936 she had been joined by
Miss Savage in giving such instruction. For several scattered
years these two and Mr. Wyllie had also been in charge
of extension offerings in Library Science at Charlottesville,
Lynchburg, Ashland, and Richmond.

7. PHASES OF THE LIBRARY SERVICE

In an earlier statement of the intent underlying the
University Library's manuscript project, the expression
was used, “to do the spade work for historical scholarship.”
Therein was both humility and aspiration. Thomas Jefferson
recognized that there was range in library service. We
have seen that to his mind the duties of a Librarian were
simple, but that the possibilities of service mounted toward
those of his own ministry as a counsellor to readers. As
the Librarians of the first hundred years acquired age and
experience, they increasingly enjoyed the privileges of contact
with youth in a period of widening horizons. The gratifications
of college librarianship carried over into the second
hundred years; but to those had now been added new
opportunities arising from the developing research functions
of the University Library. There was evidence of the

quality of the Library Staff of the second century in its
desire to discover and extend those new opportunities.

A good spirit in the normal service performed by a
Library Staff is readily recognized. But there is no exact
formula for its inculcation. Indeed there had been patent
difficulties in the situation that prevailed in the University
of Virginia Libraries, especially during the last decade of
this 1925–1950 period. The open hours of the General Library
and of the Engineering, Law, and Medical Libraries
had been liberally extended. The Alderman Library
was regularly open on weekdays for fifteen hours, from
eight in the morning until eleven at night, except for a ten
o'clock closing on Saturday nights; and the Sunday opening
was from two in the afternoon until eleven at night—a
weekly total of ninety-eight hours. Since the full time work
week for a staff member was forty hours, this necessitated
the selection of many assistants and the delegation to them
of the responsibility for a willing and helpful service. It is
a trite saying that a chain is as strong as its weakest link.
The application to library service is obvious. The heads of
the Divisions of the Library Staff had doubtless made such
use of precept as might prove palatable. But it had obviously
been their own examples that had been most potent;
and in this matter of example, many other members of
the Staff who have not been mentioned in this history had
made notable contributions.

Other elements had affected the normal service of the
University Library. In a period notorious for rapid changes
in the personnel of American libraries, this Staff had benefited
by a remarkable degree of continuity. Knowledge of
the Library's resources that can be gained only by experience
tends to expedite and expand the aid to students and
scholars. Moreover encouragement had been given to staff
members who showed a desire to keep in touch with the
intellectual life of the University. One form that such

encouragement had taken was an action by the Faculty
Library Committee in 1944. The resolution read:

Several members of the Staff, notably Miss Savage and Mr.
Dalton, had volunteered assistance, outside of library hours,
to non-professional members who wished to prepare for
the State's library certification examinations; and for a
considerable period Mr. Dalton had conducted an evening
reading course for interested members of the Staff, the
excitements of which had been readily carried over into the
daytime routine contacts with books and readers.

The net result had been a responsive library service
which had elicited much approbation. Commendation had
been specific on the willingness—to use the Biblical phrase—
to go the second mile, to take the initiative in the effort to
be helpful. In the newly extended use of the Library for
research endeavors there had been increased opportunities
for thus giving positive force to the library service. To this
end there had been experimentation in various ways. The
ways were perhaps not novel. But there was some degree of
novelty in their application to a Library, particularly to a
rare book section of a Library. One element the experiments
all seemed to have in common; namely, that there
was much labor involved. The story of the phases of this
library service might therefore be briefly described as compounded
of some imagination, considerable courage, and
very much hard work.

With the opening in 1949 of the exhibition gallery on
the second floor of the Alderman Library, there had come

into use in that building four centers for display purposes—
an unusually abundant equipment for such uses. The
policy had been definitely away from permanent exhibits;
and the frequent changes, which the local press had been
encouraged to regard as newsworthy, had been steadily suggestive
both of current interests and of the resources of the
Library. The range had been wide—from the works of a
local author or artist and from specimens from a student's
rare book gleanings or from a locally owned stamp collection
to incunabula, illustrations of bookmaking, and editions
and translations of the Bible; from material appropriate
to Garden Week, the Music Festival, Founder's Day,
and Christmas to displays of French art, Japanese prints,
and Russian ikons; from homes and characters and events of
University and Virginia history to presidential campaigns
and the United Nations. Under Mr. Wyllie's supervision,
Miss Ruth Evelyn Byrd had made such exhibits her special
province; and Miss Land and her associates in the Circulation
Division had steadily maintained in the entrance hall,
as temptations to borrowers, displays of books of current
interest.

There had been encouragement also to Professors giving
graduate courses, in which book materials were essential, to
hold occasional class meetings in the McGregor Room,
where rare editions pertaining to the subject matter of the
course could be examined and discussed. This had carried
into the humanities something of the value for science of
laboratory work and had helped to give meaning to such
vague terms as research and original sources. A development
on a larger scale had been the occasional seminars in
modern prose and poetry which had been sponsored jointly
by the Schools of English and the Alderman Library. These
had been addressed by prominent literary figures and, with
admission by cards of invitation, had regularly attracted
audiences limited only by the capacity of the McGregor

Room. These had been called the McGregor Room Seminars.
But beginning with 1951 they were to be known as
the Peters Rushton Seminars, in memory of the young
teacher and scholar who had taken a prominent part in their
beginnings. For each of those meetings appropriate library
exhibits had been prepared. Similar preparations had been
made for the meetings in the McGregor Room of the University
of Virginia Bibliographical Society, that society
being a development from bibliographical interests which
had found a congenial center in the Library's Rare Book
and Manuscript Division. Another organization which had
had its origin in a pooling of interests in local historical
matters had been the Albemarle County Historical Society.
Both the Bibliographical Society and the Historical Society
had had their birthplaces in this Library, but the
resulting membership had in each case extended well
beyond the immediate university community. Thus, in
addition to its primary function of affording intensive aid
to research scholars, the Library had found indirect means
for stimulating and extending literary and historical interests.

Moreover, both the Bibliographical and the Historical
Societies had produced publications, the editorial work in
each case centering in the Alderman Library. By 1950 there
had appeared the first two volumes of Studies in Bibliography,
the papers of the University of Virginia Bibliographical
Society edited by Professor Fredson Bowers—a
series which from its beginning was recognized as of marked
distinction. By 1950 there had also been issued ten volumes
of the Papers of the Albemarle County Historical Society,
the first five edited by Archivist Cappon, the sixth to eighth
by Dr. William Edwin Hemphill, and the last two by Mr.
William Munford Ellis Rachal, Messrs. Hemphill and
Rachal being members of the staff of the Virginia World
War II History Commission, which then had its headquarters

McGregor Room and two McGregor publications

Jefferson Inscription to Lafayette in a Presentation Copy of the
First Edition of the Notes on the State of Virginia

in the Alderman Library. At least two of the values
of publications of a superior grade were illustrated by these
series: they not only widened the recognition of the services
being rendered by these organizations, but they also
proved an incentive to sustained effort by the organizations
themselves.

The value of publications as an active force in public
relations had already been recognized at the University
of Virginia Libraries, and in this 1925–1950 period there
had been started three series emanating from the General
Library, one series of unique character from the Law
Library, and a number of special publications and of
contributions to cooperative undertakings.

The Law Library publication, The Reading Guide, had
student editors and student and faculty contributors and
consisted of signed reviews of new books and of interesting
old books that could be found in the library stacks, each
issue containing also a selected bibliography on a subject
of contemporary importance.

Of the Alderman Library group, the first in point of
time had been the Annual Reports of the Archivist, later
entitled Reports on Historical Collections. Of these, twenty
had been issued by 1950. Two cumulative indexes, covering
years one to fifteen and years sixteen to twenty, formed a
ready guide to what could be found in the extensive manuscript
collection. The second was the University of Virginia
Bibliographical Series, which began in 1941 and had reached
its ninth number in 1950. The eighth number was an
especially impressive publication, The Jefferson Papers of
the University of Virginia, this being a calendar compiled
by Constance E. Thurlow and Francis L. Berkeley, Jr. As
for the third series, the publications of the Tracy W. McGregor
Library, that had been a direct attempt to create a
wider stimulus service for the rare books of the McGregor
collection. The eight publications which had been issued

by 1950 had each presented the text of a rare item of source
material found in the McGregor Library, with critical
introductions and bibliographical apparatus prepared by
authorities from this or other Universities. The McGregor
publications had been designed and printed with care and
had been distributed widely, especially among members of
the Southern Historical Association.

Among the special publications were a folder descriptive
of the McGregor Library and a McGregor Reading
List in American History, the latter being an experiment
in widening the possibilities for a more exact knowledge of
national history. This reading list had been issued during
the last session of this period, and a widespread demand
for it had led to several reprintings.

Emphasis on the principle of cooperation, the principle
which had been adopted at the outset of the endeavor to
make historical materials available for scholarly research,
had led to opportunities not a few. One was the arrangement
with the Virginia State Library and with other Virginia
libraries to divide the responsibility for preserving
files of local newspapers. Towards this effort the newspaper
publishers and editors had proved generously responsive.
Archivist Cappon's Virginia Newspapers: A Bibliography
with Historical Introduction and Notes, a volume of some
300 pages which was issued in 1936 as a monograph of the
University's Institute for Research in the Social Sciences,
and which recorded the files held in various libraries, was
among the first fruits of the effort to add availability to
preservation.

Another comprehensive cooperative project in which
the University of Virginia Library was associated with the
Library of Congress, the Virginia State Library, the William
and Mary College Library, and the Library of the
Virginia Historical Society, and for which Mr. Wyllie was
General Editor, was the compilation and publication of

localized sections of a Virginia Imprint Series. Preliminary
checklists for three centers had been issued by 1950. This
plan of procedure had proved of interest to several other
States; and reports of University of Virginia Library holdings
of their imprints were at the close of this period being
supplied to somewhat similar projects in Maryland, Pennsylvania,
and New Jersey.

Other cooperative undertakings in which this Library
had a share may be listed briefly. Most of these were being
handled in the office of the Rare Book and Manuscript
Division, and several were just beginning in 1950. One,
which has already been mentioned, was the complete representation
in the Union Catalogue at the Library of Congress
of cards for University of Virginia book holdings. Cards for
this Library's holdings in Confederate imprints had begun
to go to an extensive project being sponsored by the Athenaeum
Library in Boston; cards for unofficial Confederate
publications had been sent for an undertaking at the University
of North Carolina; and a listing of this Library's collection
of Confederate music had been included in an index
in preparation by Mr. Richard Barksdale Harwell, Curator
of Special Collections at Emory University in Georgia. The
University of Virginia Library had been contributing to the
continuation in process at Worcester, Massachusetts, of the
great Evans American Bibliography; to a film inventory at
Philadelphia; to the Florida Catalogue at Winter Park; to
the inventory of seventeenth century English books in process
at Yale University, under the editorship of Dr. Donald
Goddard Wing; to the union list of American literary
manuscripts to be edited by Dr. Joseph J. Jones of the University
of Texas; to the supplement to the De Ricci-Wilson
Census of Mediaeval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the
United States and Canada, which is to be edited by Professor
Christopher Urdahl Faye of the University of Illinois; and
to the compilation of American holdings of entries in the

Pollard and Redgrave Short Title Catalogue, this last being
an undertaking by Dr. William Warner Bishop of the University
of Michigan. The University of Virginia was of
course contributing whenever opportunity offered to the
Princeton edition of the writings of Thomas Jefferson.
Checklists which had been or were being compiled at the
University of Virginia Library of material connected with
John Randolph of Roanoke, James Madison, James Monroe,
and John C. Calhoun were, at the close of this period,
being considered as the possible bases for extensive future
publication projects by the National Historical Publications
Commission.

Mention of the Princeton edition of Jefferson's Works
and of the Thurlow-Berkeley calendar of Jefferson Papers
of the University of Virginia brings us to the special attention
that had been given in this period to this Library's
Founder. The Library had become an active collector of
books by and about Thomas Jefferson, of the many editions
of the Notes on the State of Virginia and of the Manual of
Parliamentary Practice, of manuscript letters, of material
of all sorts. One huge undertaking had been conceived
early in this 1925–1950 period and had been steadily and
resolutely carried out: a checklist arranged chronologically
of all reported Jeffersonian texts, either in print or in
manuscript, including letters to him as well as those written
by him, the entries giving date, description, location, and
ownership, and information concerning printed form. It
was realized that this Jefferson checklist would be of impressive
size—and eventually it reached an accumulation of well
over 75,000 record slips. Mr. Wyllie, who had started this
while he was Curator of the Virginia Collection, had made
work on it a continuous order of the day; and though others
assisted, this was essentially his creation. When he obtained
leave of absence for war service in the month before the
attack on Pearl Harbor, the results had become so extensive

and so visibly a record of Thomas Jefferson's daily interests
that the Library of Congress proposed that this checklist
be published under the joint imprint of the two Libraries
—thus once more linking the major and the minor institutional
collections which owed their origin to the same distinguished
Founder. The impact of the second world war
compelled postponement of any such project, however
desirable. When, following the Jefferson Bicentennial of
1943, the generous and patriotic proposals from the New
York Times and the Princeton University Press and the
availability as Editor of the superbly equipped Dr. Julian
Parks Boyd presented the possibility of as complete an
edition of the Jeffersonian writings as seemed humanly
possible, the need for the publication of the checklist was,
for the time at least, transferred into its immediate value
as the effective means for a rapid but comprehensive survey
of what would be involved in the proposed undertaking.
Had there been any serious question about value in “spade
work for historical scholarship,” that doubt could at that
point have been gratifyingly dismissed.

The Bicentennial had also been a harvest time for books
and articles about Jefferson. The following list is by way
of illustration. This is, however, a list of books only; and
of the many books written about Thomas Jefferson during
this period only those have been included to whose authors
or editors the University of Virginia Library is known to
have been able to render some assistance. What this list
really illustrates is, therefore, one more benefit conferred
on this Library by its Founder. For he was now, in his
own person as it were, endowing this Library with the
subject matter for an especially fruitful and rewarding
phase of its service.

Abernethy, Thomas Perkins, editor. A Summary View of the Rights
of British America, by Thomas Jefferson. New York, Scholars'
Facsimiles & Reprints, 1943.

Betts, Edwin Morris, editor. Thomas Jefferson's Garden Book,
1766–1824. Philadelphia. American Philosophical Society, 1944.

Betts, Edwin Morris, and Perkins, Hazelhurst Bolton. Thomas
Jefferson's Flower Garden at Monticello. Richmond, The
Dietz Press, 1941.

Bullock, Helen Duprey. My Head and My Heart: A Little History
of Thomas Jefferson and Maria Cosway. New York, Putnam,
c1945.

Cometti, Elizabeth, editor. Jefferson's Ideas on a University
Library: Letters from the Founder of the University of Virginia
to a Boston Bookseller. Charlottesville, Tracy W. McGregor
Library, 1950.

Davis, Richard Beale, editor. Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson
and Francis Walker Gilmer, 1814–1826. Columbia, University
of South Carolina Press, 1946.

Davis, Richard Beale. Francis Walker Gilmer: Life and Learning
in Jefferson's Virginia. Richmond, The Dietz Press, 1939.

Foote, Henry Wilder, editor. The Life and Morals of Jesus of
Nazareth Extracted Textually from the Gospels of Matthew,
Mark, Luke, and John, by Thomas Jefferson. Boston, The
Beacon Press, 1951.

Foote, Henry Wilder. Thomas Jefferson, Champion of Religious
Freedom, Advocate of Christian Morals. Boston, The Beacon
Press, 1947.

Kimball, Marie. Jefferson, the Road to Glory, 1743 to 1776. New
York, Coward-McCann, c1943.

Kimball, Marie. Jefferson, War and Peace, 1776 to 1784. New York,
Coward-McCann, c1947.

Kimball, Marie. Jefferson: The Scene of Europe, 1784 to 1789.
New York, Coward-McCann, c1950.

Koch, Adrienne, and Peden, William, editors. The Life and
Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson. New York, The Modern
Library, c1944.

Logan, Rayford W., editor. Memoirs of a Monticello Slave ...
Charlottesville, The Tracy W. McGregor Library, 1951.

Malone, Dumas. Jefferson the Virginian. Boston, Little, Brown
and Company, 1948.

Malone, Dumas. Jefferson and the Rights of Man. Boston, Little,
Brown and Company, 1951.

Mayo, Bernard, editor. Jefferson Himself: The Personal Narrative

of a Many-Sided American. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company,
1942.

Mayo, Bernard, editor. Thomas Jefferson and his Unknown Brother
Randolph ... Charlottesville, The Tracy W. McGregor
Library, 1942.

Shepperson, Archibald Bolling. John Paradise and Lucy Ludwell
of London and Williamsburg. Richmond, The Dietz Press,
1942.

So this attempt at a history of the University of Virginia
Library has ended where it began—with Thomas Jefferson;
and its first paragraph might now profitably be reread along
with these concluding sentences. Many long years, sundry
visible changes, and a few exciting moments have separated
the beginning and the end. In essence, however, there are
a similarity and a difference between the situation in 1825
and the situation in 1950 which afford present cause for
encouragement and for sober thought.

The Founder's estimate of the importance for the
University of the service of its Library had been notably
high. The more recent advances had in a measure restored
to the Library the place which Jefferson had envisioned for
it. That restoration had helped to renew the forward urge
which was implicit in Jefferson's intent. The year 1950 was
therefore not an end, but merely a link in the annals of a
fresh beginning. Herein was the stimulus for new hope.

There was reason also for sober thought. At its beginning
in 1825 the books so carefully selected by Jefferson in
his eighty-second year formed a solid and essential core for
a well rounded university library. The additions to 1895
had been built on that firm foundation. Both foundation
and superstructure had been in large part destroyed by the
burning of the Rotunda. Since 1895 there had been
assembled a vastly larger collection. But the order of the
building process had been reversed. There was now much
superstructure, but the firm foundation was still to be
settled in. Attempts had been made from time to time to

strengthen the edifice at its base. But this had been largely
a process subjected to chance—to good fortune in gifts, to
casual market offerings, to the moment's possession or lack
of available general funds. It was at the end, not at the
beginning, of the fifty-five years since 1895 of the University's
new collection that the group of faculty representatives
chosen as experts by the various Departments and
Schools, for liaison with the Library's efforts at collection
building, was settling down to create a want list of the
significant works and monumental sets for each branch of
learning. It is true that in the years that had elapsed since
Jefferson's day more and broader fields of learning had
been opened and surveyed, and that to establish what would
now be a solid and essential core of university library materials
would necessarily be a much larger undertaking. Yet
in concept this purpose was identical with that performed
by Jefferson when he compiled his list for the Boston bookseller.
It was therefore a sobering thought as well as a
stimulus to forward action that in 1950 some thirty experts,
with a considerable degree of diffidence, had become
engaged in a fundamental library undertaking which had
in 1825 been achieved single-handed by the Sage of Monticello.