"In My Father's House Are Many Mansions"

Abstract

IN 1958 the Council on Library Resources, Inc., a subsidiary of the Ford Foundation that is seeking the solution of various library problems, made a grant to the Boston Athenaeum to permit me to spend a year studying the research and publication functions and the financial future of independently supported historical societies throughout the United States. This grant was made on the combined request of four of the oldest and most distinguished of such organizations—the Massachusetts Historical Society, the American Antiquarian Society, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the Virginia Historical Society. Such private voluntary associations, formed to further learning, were the first to preserve, make available to scholars, and publish the significant source materials of American history. The earliest of all, the Massachusetts Historical Society, was formed in 1791 in Boston, 93 years prior to the founding of the American Historical Association; by the outbreak of the Civil War more than 60 others had been organized. Every State east of Texas, with the single exception of Delaware, was represented; United States Army officers even organized a historical society in the Territory of New Mexico. Not all of these proved permanent, for such bodies throve only in regions where prosperity permitted some leisure for literary and historical pursuits. Even on the frontier, where leisure did not exist, historical societies were founded early, sometimes before there was any substantial body of history to record. In such surroundings, support had to come from the State, if at all. The phenomenon of consistent legislative appropriation for historical societies first developed in the second half of the nineteenth century in Wisconsin under the influence of that avid collector of frontier manuscripts, Lyman C. Draper, secretary of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin from