When Clarence Ward, Oberlin’s first director of the Allen Memorial Art Museum and first art professor with a doctorate, arrived in Oberlin in 1916 one of his first projects was to found an art library in what is now the museum’s East Gallery. Inspired by his friend I.T. Frary—the architectural critic, historian, photographer and author of Thomas Jefferson, architect and builder (Richmond, 1931)—Ward looked to Thomas Jefferson’s library as a model.

Although he had more contemporary resources available, the painstaking process of reconstructing Jefferson’s library was a means of pulling together an authoritative basis for modern artistic and technical knowledge about architecture, landscape, decorative and mechanical arts, and fine arts. When he retired from the college in 1949, the library, now in the second-floor gallery, had grown to nearly 25,000 books, prints and photographs; the Jefferson Architecture Collection was housed in a seminar room dedicated to the study of American architecture.

In 1943, the bicentennial of Jefferson’s birth, Ward designed a “Jefferson Room” for the study of American architecture and to house his “Jefferson Books.” A seminar room with books, periodicals, blueprints, prints, the Jefferson Books were “on shelves open to public inspection and handling.” “This expression of trust in human integrity has not been violated to date.”[3] In addition to securing Jefferson’s library the room was used for seminars and contained the library’s American architecture titles. By adding one or two titles a year the collection had grown to 46 titles in 1952.

The room also contained “mounted pictures of Renaissance architecture and the large collection of American architectural photographs for the Ward and I.T. Frary collections [4] as well as a lantern slide projector and screen [5]

Image Credit: Clarence Ward as a young man and the Jefferson Room ca. 1943. Courtesy Oberlin College Archives

 



3. Sims, Elizabeth Florence.
    The Allen Memorial Art Museum Library, Oberlin, Ohio; a study, by Elizabeth Florence Sims.
    [Cleveland, Ohio] School of Library Science, Western Reserve University, 1952. p. 33
4. Ibid
5. Sims p. 32