Creating the South Caroliniana Library

Abstract

John M. Bryan’s Creating the South Caroliniana Library is a 175th anniversary celebration of the first freestanding academic library in the United States, a richly illustrated coffee table–style book with fifty color photos, thirty halftones, and fifteen line drawings. Bryan uses university records and publications, interviews, and the South Caroliniana Library (SCL) manuscript and image collections to examine one library as the interconnected story of building, collections, and people. South Carolina College (SCC), the early name of the University of South Carolina (UofSC), opened in the capital city in 1805. The library was housed in rooms in various campus buildings until construction of a separate library building in 1840, the first at any college in the country, although closely followed by Harvard in 1841 and Yale in 1846.Bryan is a UofSC professor emeritus of art and architecture who has written about early UofSC buildings, the South Carolina Statehouse, and Biltmore Estate, among others. He also has spent more than forty years researching and writing about the life, works, and influences of architect Robert Mills, a South Carolina native known for public buildings in his home state and Washington, DC. Bryan’s expertise is evident in the portions of the book that explore the building itself, particularly where he pieces together Mills’s involvement in the library’s design by analyzing early notebook sketches, architectural renderings, and the final structure itself, which included a near replica of the second Library of Congress reading room. Similarly, he carefully details the building’s renovations and growth through architect John Carroll Johnson’s 1920s addition of two fireproof wings, one with five levels of a brand of prefabricated metal adjustable bookshelves popular in that era.Interwoven with the architectural analysis, Bryan traces the history of the collection housed within, highlighting the stories of acquisitions such as Audubon’s Birds of America. The Mills-designed building was the main campus library until 1940, and the collection served the college’s general academic purposes through that time. While prior to the Civil War the collection was described as one of the largest and best-selected academic libraries in the country, Bryan provides little analysis of what those descriptions meant. The terms are more fully placed in their historical context by Howard Clayton in his article “The American College Library: 1800–1860” (1963) and by Stephen Ferguson in his paper “Keeping the Code: The College Library at the Middle of the Nineteenth Century” (2002), which notes the phrase “well selected” was used by academic libraries in that era based on publication dates and number of volumes and was favored as a promotional statement implying the school’s academic prestige. Post–Civil War, the SCC library lost both descriptions as the collection stagnated during several decades of financial hardship and political turmoil in the state.Although the first Carolina-related manuscript—John Drayton’s The Carolinian Florist—was acquired in 1807, the specialization that would characterize the modern SCL gained momentum in the early twentieth century. Bryan identifies changes in approaches to history, collecting, and librarianship, many influenced by the founding of the ALA and rise of the profession, that had an impact on the SCL collection. Reflecting national interest in local history and “scientific” or primary document-based history, a group of faculty, trustees, and library friends searched earnestly for public records, manuscripts, correspondence, publications, and other documents with any connection to South Carolina. Although university administrators provided some funds, the collectors often were thwarted by “outsiders”—institutions in other states with better resources, notably Duke University and the Southern Historical Collection of the University of North Carolina.The Historical Records Survey, Federal Writers’ Program, and other New Deal projects also had a significant impact on the breadth, scope, and organization of the growing Caroliniana collection, leading to the first meeting of a “University Caroliniana Society” in 1937. After a new main library opened in 1940, the Mills building was turned over to the Caroliniana Committee of the university with its own director and staff. The newly named South Caroliniana Library continued to grow in collections and staff, eventually divesting artifacts, university records, rare books, and political collections to other campus buildings and entities while focusing on strengthening previously undercollected areas. The Richard Samuel Roberts collection of glass plate negatives, obtained in the 1970s, was a notable result of an effort to collect post–Civil War African American history.Bryan enlivens the book with profiles of many individuals who shaped the SCL building and collections—college presidents, librarians, professors, collectors, and benefactors. They include Richard Theodore Greener, Harvard’s first African American graduate and the UofSC’s first African American faculty member during the brief Reconstruction-era interlude when the school was open without regard to “race, color or creed.” While also serving as librarian, Greener created a historically valuable report and photographs of the library before being forced to leave the state as the college reverted to racial segregation that would last until 1963.Creating the South Caroliniana Library will most appeal to UofSC alumni and researchers who have experienced the building and collections directly. It also might be inspiration for explorations of the history of other academic or specialized libraries. In his research for The Evolution of the American Academic Library Building (1997), David Kaser examined the influence of teaching methods, technology, and architectural history on academic libraries and discovered that most histories of individual academic libraries exist, if at all, only as chapters in institutional histories, articles, or exhibitions. This book is a solid example of how to tell a more detailed story.