University of Virginia Library

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.