An Early "Friend" of Libraries

Abstract

IN THE past decade groups have sprung up all over this country calling themselves Friends of this or that library. The active interest and the very considerable financial support which these associated laymen are giving to various American libraries are encouraging and heartening both to library trustees and to librarians. By this little sketch we wish to nominate for enrolment in the circle of Friends one who came on the scene too early to be a member of any such organized group but who was, nevertheless, truly a friend of libraries. Local histories of Chicago and biographical publications of a half-century ago sketch briefly the life of this man as a laywer and as a public spirited citizen, but none of these sketches sufficiently stresses the debt we owe him as an early friend of the American library movement. Mark Skinner was born in Manchester, Vermont, on September I3, I8I3. His mother was a Pierpont, and her father, Robert Pierpont, was a cousin of John of that name, whose Airs of Palestine and other publications in verse were esteemed in their day and ranked the author as one of the literary lights of the mid-nineteenth century. His father, Richard Skinner, was a man of eminence in New England, distinguished for his legal and political abilities. He held several public offices. He was a member of Congress (i 8 I3-I 5), governor of Vermont (I820-23), and, from I823 to I828, was chief justice of the Supreme Court of the State of Vermont. Such was Mark Skinner's scholarly heritage and the atmosphere of public service in which he was reared. He prepared for college in a school at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and graduated from Middlebury College with the class of 1833. Inheriting, apparently from his father, a taste for the law, he set about equipping himself for the legal profession. He spent a year at the Yale Law School and two years in the law offices of an able lawyer in Saratoga Springs. In 1836 his attention was drawn to the infant settlement of Chicago, and, like his later friend, Walter Loomis Newberry, and other pioneers of this city, he had the vision to see that the south end of Lake Michi-