The Valley Library - History

History

Oregon State University was established in 1868. The Oregon Legislative Assembly appropriated $1,000 to the school to buy books for a library in 1876, marking the first instance of the legislature giving funds to the school for a library. In 1887, the library was established at the school, and in 1890, May Warren was hired as the first full-time librarian. By 1893 the library's collection had grown to 1,950 volumes. After adding 2,600 volumes from 1899 to 1900, the collection stood at 5,000 volumes. At that time the library was a free, general library with both circulating and reference collections with A. J. Stimpson serving as the librarian. The library also had 6,000 pamphlets at that time and the annual circulation was 8,000.

By 1909, the collection had grown to 10,000 volumes and 10,000 pamphlets, with R. J. Nichols as the librarian. The library collection continued to grow and totaled 36,478 volumes in 1918. In February 1917, the state legislature gave the school $65,000 towards construction of a building to house the library.

Oregon Agricultural College opened a new library in 1918, marking the first time that the library had its own building. Prior to 1918 the library had been housed on the second floor of the college's administration building, Benton Hall. When the new building was completed, the school built a temporary trellis from neighboring Benton Hall's second floor to the second floor of the new building in order to more easily transfer the books to their new location. Initially, the new building also housed offices and classrooms, but within a decade the library expanded to occupy all of the structure. John V. Bennes designed the new building, as well as many of the campus buildings constructed during that period. By 1922 the collection had grown to 73,000 volumes, and Lucy M. Lewis served as the school's librarian.

The new library was remodeled on several occasions, with a new wing added in 1941. The 1918 building was located on the southeast corner of Campus Way and Waldo Place and after the 1941 addition, had about 76,000 square feet (7,100 m2) of space spread over three floors and a full basement. Designed in the neoclassical style, the exterior was made of bricks and contained decorative plaques constructed of concrete, with the gabled roof covered with tile. The original design had two-story reading rooms, which were converted to single-story rooms in the 1950s. A mural painted by J. Leo Fairbanks was added to the main reading room in 1929 as a gift from the school's class of 1925. The mural was titled Recorded Information and was the second mural in that room by Fairbanks, who was the longtime head of the school's art department.

Beginning in 1932, Mary J. L. McDonald made the then largest donation of books to the library when she donated volumes worth just over $10,000. She donated a total of over 1,000 items that included a complete works of Abraham Lincoln valued at $4,800. In 1936, the Works Progress Administration gave a decorative archway to the library to be installed over the south entrance to the building. The library was among several buildings vandalized by University of Oregon students in October 1945 during the run-up to the Civil War football game between the two schools. The library received a bequest of about 5,500 volumes valued at about $15,000 in December 1947 from William H. Galvani's estate. This donation overtook that of McDonald to become the largest received by the library up to that time.

By 1940, the collections at the library had increased to total of about 130,000 and 1,400 serials. Included in the collections were a variety of rare items, such as a page from the 1642 printing of the Polychronicon, a 1628 book of poems written in Latin, and a 1769 bible printed by John Baskerville, among others. At that time the building was open from 7:50 am until 10 pm on weekdays, and 2 pm to 5 pm on Sundays. Construction on the new wing of the library started in 1940 and was designed by John V. Bennes, the same architect who designed the original structure. He also designed a matching wing for the other side as well, but that wing was never added.