University of Virginia Library

Seventh Annual Report of the Archivist, University of
Virginia Library, for the Year 1936-37

IT HAS been the practice in previous reports of this series to relate
archival developments at the University of Virginia and in the Commonwealth
to those in other states and in the nation at large, in order
to keep abreast with the national movement in this field of scholarship.
Events of the past year point to a new era in the science of archives in
the United States, to large-scale co-operation in providing guides to archives
and manuscript collections of all kinds, and to a journal for discussion
of problems and policies. In the care and administration of
their archives some states can boast of notable accomplishments reaching
back several generations; others have undertaken their responsibility
during the present century; and all have had the opportunity of seeking
the counsel of the Public Archives Commission of the American Historical
Association.[1] It was the pioneering of this Commission that led
to the founding of the Society of American Archivists during the meeting
of the American Historical Association at Providence, R. I., December
29, 1936; and it is also significant that the first annual meeting of the
new society, June 18-19, 1937, was held in the National Archives Building,
Washington, D. C.

With the National Archives in operation in all departments, the time
was ripe, beyond a doubt, for the organization of the society. A projected
quarterly to be called "The American Archivist" suggests the kind
of service which the society plans to render. As for the National Archives
with its staff of specialists, it bids fair to become a great clearinghouse
of information in all phases of archival science, as well as the
repository of official records of the federal government.[2] The magnitude
of the program and the immense body of material to be handled
have moved certain foreign scholars to "admire the courage with which
American Archivists are attacking a vast task and the breadth of outlook
with which the attack is planned. . . ."[3] The states, in their
contribution of ideas based upon long experience with archives and

manuscript collections, have demonstrated the kind of co-operation that
will doubtless prevail between them and the National Archives.

State plans and achievements worthy of special mention are the new
Illinois state archives building now nearing completion, plans for a
new building in North Carolina, and for a permanent state archives
commission in Vermont.[4] Public support for a new state library in Virginia
(to include the state archives) is gaining momentum again, with the
prospect that the legislature may take action in 1938. At the University
of Virginia the new library under construction is about half completed.
One wing of this building, fireproof, with temperature and humidity
controlled, and with a vault at one end, will house the manuscript collection
which numbers well over half a million pieces. There will be
adequate facilities for the expansion of this collection, for the rare books,
maps, and microfilm equipment, for the newspaper collection of over
five hundred volumes in the adjoining stacks, for exhibition cases, and
for ample room for research workers. The appeal made to Virginians
in the University's broadside of 1930[5] for the preservation of manuscripts
and historical materials of all kinds in the library, now takes on
added significance as the new building offers ideal quarters for them.

The inventory of county and city official records throughout Virginia,
which was taken over by the Historical Records Survey under the Works
Progress Administration early in 1936,[6] is slowly but surely covering
all sections of the state. Two new supervisors were appointed in September,
1936, one for southside, the other for southwestern Virginia, to
replace two who were released in the tidewater region; and the completion
of the work in the latter area has been supervised from the Richmond
office. The archivist continued as state director until the summer
of 1937, when, owing to a drastic cut in the non-relief quota, his
official connection with the project ceased, although he has acted since
in an advisory capacity. At present about two-thirds of the counties
have been inventoried, but checking the data, which the Washington
office has vigorously and wisely insisted upon, has proved to be a slow
process and has amounted in some cases to relisting all the records. The
most serious problem has been that of personnel for stenographic and

research work in compiling and writing the introductory historical and
descriptive material, so that the inventories may be prepared in final
form for publication. What with Virginia's small urban population,
competition among WPA projects for "white collar" workers, and the
re-employment of large numbers in private industry, one must conclude
that the better qualified worker is not looking for a job but for an
advancement from the one he holds.

In government relief work all officers and employees must learn to
live largely by faith as one emergency succeeds another and "the substance
of things hoped for" fades once again into the future. In view
of this condition it is a tribute to the well laid plans of the national director,
Dr. Luther H. Evans, and their efficient execution by him and
his staff of the Historical Records Survey that they have been able to
anticipate with a fair degree of certainty its prolongation for another
year at least. It has undertaken a stupendous program which only the
federal government could carry out on a national scale, and samples of
the results which have appeared in some of the states have been commended
by historians and other scholars.[7] It is only fair to point out
that those states which have issued inventories as approved by the Washington
office have aided materially in guaranteeing the life of the national
project. In Virginia, where no inventory has been completed yet
in final form, the project has the opportunity of profiting by the experience
and improving upon the product of those states farther advanced.
The work of the survey on church and labor records and on manuscript
collections in depositories throughout Virginia has been held in abeyance
temporarily in order to concentrate upon the completion of the first
county inventories. On March 15, 1937, some of the newspapers in
the state carried a story of the survey's first year of operation in Virginia
with comments on some of the more interesting records discovered.[8]
The work of this project and of the Survey of Federal Archives
throughout the South was described by Dr. Philip M. Hamer of the
National Archives at a luncheon conference on archives and manuscripts
during the annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association at
Nashville, November 20, 1936.

One of the largest manuscript acquisitions of the University during
the past year is the John Warwick Daniel (1842-1910) Collection, covering
the period from 1860 to his death. The materials on the eventful
career of this soldier, lawyer, and senator are extensive and varied

enough for a biographical study.[9] They include about one hundred war
letters to his father and family, 1861-65; a few volumes of law notes
and quotations written during his reading of the classics—an "index
rerum", to use his own phrase; letter-press books for 1872-73, 1882-84,
and 1889-90; pocket diaries for parts of 1901, 1903-05, and 1907; letters
of congratulation on his election to the United States Senate in
1885; and many books of clippings on his political activities after he became
a national figure. Having served under General Jubal A. Early,
Daniel began to write a book on the military exploits of this Confederate
leader. Much of Daniel's extensive correspondence with war veterans
in preparation for this study and part of his preliminary draft are in
the collection. One of the most popular orators of his day, he delivered
speeches on a wide variety of subjects and many of the original manuscripts
are extant—on the state debt question, monetary problems, the
tariff, the Spanish-American War, the railroads, Virginia politics, the
race question, etc.

The Withrow Family papers, 1880-95, from Waynesboro, Augusta
County, are concerned mainly with matters of personal interest from
Florida, Virginia, Augusta, Ga. (the Academy of Richmond County),
and from M. H. Houston, a missionary in China. Some comments on
the Presbyterian Church in Waynesboro will be found, and an interesting
letter from Leander McCormick, November 1, 1879. Also from
Augusta County comes the four-volume diary of the local historian
Joseph A. Waddell (1823-1914) for the years 1855-59 and 1862-65.
The author, who appreciated its historical value for the intimate picture
it presents of civilian population under war conditions, printed excerpts
(with revised phraseology) in his history of the county.[10] Fortunately
this copy includes part of the record for 1861-62; the original for these
years is lost. The library has received a small collection of letters of
the 1850's and 1870's to Hugh Blair Grigsby from the Rev. Philip
Slaughter, William H. Ruffner, R. A. Brock, and B. Johnson Barbour,
and a copy of one of special interest from Grigsby to Lyman C. Draper,
June 22, 1875 (11 pages, certified by Draper) on the Mecklenburg
Declaration of Independence.

It is appropriate that manuscripts relating to the University of Virginia
and its faculty and students should be preserved here, and the

transfer of such documents from another institution is especially noteworthy.
Three items of 1843-44 pertaining to William Barton Rogers
(1804-1882), geologist and educator, while he was professor in the
University, were donated by the librarian of Massachusetts Institute of
Technology of which Rogers was the first president. Among other
manuscripts bearing upon University personalities are seven letters of
Schele de Vere, 1878-91, a William H. McGuffey letter, April 19, 1869,
and the testimony (typewritten) of John William Mallet as chemical expert
in a Maryland case concerning stream pollution some time after
1868. A volume of typewritten annual reports, 1926-36, of the University
of Virginia's Institute for Research in the Social Sciences describes
its progress and publications from the beginning. As the director
of the Institute saw fit to place these official records in the custody
of the library, so it is hoped that other departments will do likewise in
order better to preserve the archives of the University now generally
dispersed.[11]

The Minute Book of the Charlottesville Lyceum, 1845-56, a debating
society, contains the signature of John B. Minor as secretary, February
to September, 1845, just before he became professor of law in the University.
Fragmentary papers and broadsides of T. J. Williams, 1869-84,
an official of the public utilities of Charlottesville, afford a glimpse of
their status in a period for which there are few town records of this
kind. Three other single items may be listed at this point: a J. E. B.
Stuart letter, written from Kansas Territory, January 11, 1861, declaring
that ". . . right or wrong, alone or otherwise, I go with Virginia";
a typewritten copy of a letter by John Randolph of Roanoke,
April 10, 1824, confessing the "pleasures & pains of Opium"; and an
autograph of Warren G. Harding in a letter of 1916.

The collection of materials on economic history has been augmented
by letters and accounts of Daniel Grinnan and John Mundell of the
Fredericksburg firm of Grinnan & Mundell, mostly for the period 17901830,
direct successors of pre- and post-Revolutionary enterprises operated
under the names of Mitchell, Gray, Coates, and Mundell.[12] The
letters to Grinnan & Mudell from Glasgow merchants and from George
Murray & Company of Norfolk, Va., shed light on commercial problems
and practices during the Napoleonic wars and are suggestive of conditions
set forth in the papers of John Norton & Sons of Virginia and

London, recently published.[13] From the librarian of Virginia Polytechnic
Institute comes a small collection of mercantile accounts of William
I. Barriger of Montgomery County with the firm of Poe & Renwick of
Lynchburg, 1833-35, and one letter of 1852. The University's accumulation
of general country store records, numbering several hundred, has
been considerably increased by a long run of ledgers and journals from
Hunting Creek, Accomac County, covering the ante bellum decades, and
another from Graham's Forge, Wythe County, for the same period, the
latter also containing entries regarding the iron works of David Graham,
some of whose records were acquired earlier.[14] The mercantile account
books of R. Sterrett & Co., Panther Gap, Rockbridge County, 1828-82,
were received through the courtesy of the librarian of Cornell University,
another instance of interstate library co-operation. The personal
account book of one Dr. McCaw of Richmond, 1834-35, was used later
to record labor charges in the James River coal pits. Another gift, an
unnamed volume of private accounts, contains a list of estrays and marriages
of Albemarle County for 1781—an illustration of how a local
archive among the papers of a county official reappears years later in
private hands. The original records of the State Bank of Pamplin, Va.,
1905-31, consist of both bound volumes and loose papers. The accounts
of D. L. Eberly of Strasburg, Va., 1895-1915 (as yet unsorted), deal
with pottery-making and the transactions of a bicycle distributor.

The collection of literary manuscripts has been enriched by the essay
of the eminent critic, William Crary Brownell (1851-1928), on "The
French Provincial Spirit" (24 pages), which appeared in his volume
French Traits.[15] A compilation of interest to genealogists is Mary Willis
Minor's "Record of the Champe Family of England, Richmond
County, Va., and King George County, Va." A painstaking study by
Clifford Lewis, III, of Sir Edmund Plowden (ca. 1590-1659),[16] who is
seldom mentioned in works on colonial history, has been presented to
the library. Sir Edmund tried unsuccessfully to establish a colony to be
called New Albion on the Delaware River, but he got his discontented
colonists only so far as Virginia where he lived during 1642-48.

A unique treasure from abroad is a manuscript volume containing

fifteenth century copies in two distinct handwritings of St. Thomas
Aquinas's "Contra Impugnantes Dei Cultum et Religionem" and "De
Perfectione Spirituales Vite." They are written on vellum with decorated
initials; the binding is of the seventeenth century.

Among the manuscripts entrusted to the library on deposit are the
papers of William Daniel, Senior and Junior,[17] 1816-85. They consist
chiefly of Daniel and Warwick family letters written from Lynchburg,
Petersburg, Richmond, Nelson County, and Washington, D. C.;
they treat of political and social conditions especially before 1860 and of
military and domestic incidents during the Civil War. The Edward P.
Buford Collection, 1895-1931, affords, through the voluminous correspondence
of this prominent lawyer of Lawrenceville, Brunswick
County, an opportunity to investigate political and economic conditions
in southside Virginia over a long period. The large collection of John
B. Minor (1813-1895) Papers, 1800-1917, contains material on the law
practice and teaching of this distinguished scholar as well as family letters
embracing several generations. The papers are most numerous for
the period 1830-1900. They have been deposited with the provision that
they be withheld from use for five years. Two pocket diaries of Robert
Larimer of the 62nd Regiment, Ohio Volunteer Infantry, provide
glimpses of the war on the Carolina coast, especially in Charleston
harbor during 1863, in the vicinity of Richmond and Appomattox in
1865, and in the environs of the capital during the early months of reconstruction.
His discharge papers and copies of a few official orders
are deposited with the diaries.

The photographing of manuscript and printed materials with the
Leica camera has served not only to increase immeasurably the potentialities
of the library for research, but also to keep the staff aware of
the rapid developments in technique and equipment. Microphotography
is perhaps the most "live" subject at library and archive meetings[18]
and it is generally agreed that it is already revolutionizing the domain
of the keepers of books. The revised edition of Dr. Robert C. Binkley's
Manual[19] provides expert data on technique, materials, and comparative
costs; numerous articles are appearing in the Bulletin of the American

Library Association and other journals; and a magazine called
Microfilm has been launched.[20] During the past year the University of
Virginia has acquired a Folmer Graflex Photorecord camera for quantity
production of copy on film or paper; an Optigraph projector; and a
Fiskeoscope, a hand reading binocular lens device, especially for short
lengths of film or paper. Mr. John Cook Wyllie, curator of manuscripts,
described and exhibited some of these photographic devices at
the Newport News meeting of the Virginia Library Association, and to
him goes the major credit for the progress which the University is making
in utilizing and enlarging this equipment.

Among the manuscript records photographed are the Minutes of the
Board of Trustees of the town of Falmouth, 1728-1813, 1828-68 (2
vols.), at the falls of the Rappahannock, a busy port in colonial days.
A Military Order Book (some pages missing) recorded by Major
Henry Bedinger, U. S. A., of Shepherdstown, Va. (now W. Va.), reveals
among its routine entries something of the rough character and
harsh discipline of a portion of the first army of the United States
which fought in General Arthur St. Clair's disastrous campaign against
the Indians in the Northwest Territory, 1791.[21] Photostat copies of
Arthur Lee letters in the Harvard Library, 1769-76 and especially 177778,
have been given to the University of Virginia to improve its Lee
Collection; included is a copy of the rare pamphlet, Extracts from a Letter
written to the president of Congress by . . . Arthur Lee in answer
to a libel published in the Pennsylvania Gazette . . . by Silas
Deane . . . (Philadelphia, 1780). The University was one of
the original group of institutions which subscribed to the Edwards
Brothers' project for making microfilm copies of books printed in English
before 1550, estimated to cover about 400,000 pages. The first
shipments have arrived and have been eagerly used by some of the
faculty.

Among the more important Virginia newspaper accessions are bound
volumes of the Berryville Clarke Courier, 1895-1901; the Charlottesville
Chronicle, 1890-91; the Gordonsville Gazette, 1877-79; the Harrisonburg
Daily News, 1903-07, 1910, and Evening News, 1901-03; the
Richmond Southern Churchman, 1835-36; the Staunton Vindicator,

1865-66, the Spectator, 1908-09, the Post, 1895, the Dispatch, 1903-04,
the News, 1891-1904, 1909-15, and the Dispatch and News, 1904-09.
The library is fortunate to have received some scattered issues of the
rare Virginische Volksberichter, February 1808 to January 1809, printed
on the Henkel press at New Market. This was the first German newspaper
in Virginia. The library is filing fifty-five current papers, most
of them from Virginia and duplicating in only a few cases those in the
Virginia State Library.

Among the more rare printed works acquired by the University
Library is the John W. Daniel collection of bound pamphlets on leading
economic and political questions in the United States during the years
1880-1910, especially on monetary problems in which Daniel, as an advocate
of free silver, was keenly interested.[22] A miscellaneous accumulation
of catalogues of Virginia and out-of-state colleges from the decades
just before and after 1900 was salvaged from an old residence in
Nelson County. The Library has in process a separate author catalogue
of pamphlets bound and classified under certain general subject headings.
A unique collection of Henkel imprints in German and English
from the New Market press mentioned above includes theological and
educational works by members of the Henkel Family dating from the
first half of the nineteenth century and some early minutes of Lutheran
conferences of Virginia and North Carolina. The music that was
played and sung in Virginia homes during the nineteenth century is typified
in a diversified collection of albums and unbound sheets. Among
these are a few Stephen Collins Foster numbers and Confederate imprints.
Apparently few southern publishers and printers outside New
Orleans, Richmond, and Baltimore ventured into the musical field.[23]

The files of official documents have been augmented notably in the
field of Virginia municipal and county reports, quite apart from the
more concentrated activity along these lines by the staff of the University's
Bureau of Public Administration. City maps have been obtained
from the engineer departments of Richmond, Lynchburg, Newport
News, and Norfolk; a group of maps showing rural delivery routes in
the state from the United States Post Office Department; and some
fifty maps and leaflets from the Tennessee Department of Highways
and Public Works.

Another year's work in retrospect reminds the archivist how much he
depends upon the generous co-operation of many persons in Virginia and
beyond its borders. He takes this opportunity to express his gratitude
particularly to Dr. Garnett Ryland of the University of Richmond whose
rich fund of information was indispensable in preparing the list of
original Baptist records appended to this report; to the state director of
the Historical Records Survey, Miss Elizabeth B. Parker, who carries
so conscientiously the chief responsibilities of the project; to the district
supervisors of the HRS, Miss Katherine Watkins and Mr. John D.
Clothier, Jr., for the high calibre of their work; and to Dr. Atcheson L.
Hench of the University of Virginia for his genuine interest and aid in
the growth of the manuscript collection. Finally, the never failing assistance
of the Library staff is gratefully acknowledged and a special
word of appreciation expressed to Mr. Harry Clemons and Mr. John
Wyllie.