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U.S. Air Force Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, commander of Air Force Space Command and the highest ranking officer to graduate from Clemson University’s ROTC program, speaks to senior AFROTC cadets during an informal meeting in Tillman Hall, Aug. 31, 2017. (Photo by Ken Scar
From the Cornell Chronicle:
Teaching Winery Opens on Campus
By Ted Boscia | April 2, 2009
With the snip of a grapevine, Susan A. Henry, the Ronald P. Lynch Dean of Agriculture and Life Sciences, opened the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) Teaching Winery before a large crowd of faculty, students, vintners and other guests April 1.
Cornell, long known for its viticulture (grape-growing) research, now claims the only university teaching winery in the eastern United States. The $900,000 facility promises to prepare students for careers in New York’s wine and grape industry, which ranks third nationally in wine production and includes more than 250 wineries across the state.
Ian Merwin, the Herman M. Cohn Professor of Horticulture, and Ramón Mira de Orduña, associate professor of enology, helped Henry unveil the 1,800-square-foot building. The winery, attached to the Cornell Orchards store, will act as the Ithaca hub for CALS’s new viticulture and enology undergraduate major, which enrolls roughly 30 students and draws on more than 50 faculty members from the horticulture, food science technology, plant pathology, and applied economics and management departments. Inside the winery, students will access cutting-edge equipment to learn the science and art of winemaking.
“The College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Teaching Winery represents a major enhancement to our Viticulture and Enology (V&E) program,” said Henry. “Having this facility in Ithaca is crucial for our undergraduates, who will gain from hands-on experience in winemaking and grape-growing.”
Previously, V&E students crafted wines in a makeshift lab on the mezzanine of Stocking Hall. At the ceremony, students offered tastes of experimental wines produced in a fall 2008 class. Nearby, Sabrina Lueck ’10, a V&E major, said, “I’m beyond excited to begin using all the winery’s beautiful equipment.”
The winery includes state-of-the-art fermentation tanks and a modern microbiological and chemical lab, elements needed for the storage of grapes and the preparation and analysis of wines. It will allow students and faculty convenient access to three acres of hybrid wine grapes at Cornell Orchards and is near the program’s Lansing vineyards, which grow more traditional varieties like Pinot Noir, Riesling and Chardonnay.
“The facility will be among the finest in the United States and will provide our students with the widest possible range of winemaking experience,” said Mira de Orduña.
Mira de Orduña thanked numerous wineries and companies that donated equipment, including de-stemmers, filters, barrels and tanks, and also enzymes, yeast, bacteria and fining agents used in the production of wine. He said, in particular, that oak barrels donated by Canton Cooperage of Lebanon, Ky., and that a custom-made WinePod fermenter by Provina of San Jose, Calif., would expose students to “both the most traditional and the latest equipment available in winemaking.”
Ted Boscia is a staff writer in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
Chrissy Chard and Kellie Walters, the co-founders of Smart Fit Girls, with some of their students at Riverside Middle School in Pendleton, S.C., April 6, 2017. (Photo by Ken Scar).
Families, students, faculty, staff and administrators came together to celebrate the college, student achievement, and larger community.
Uris Library
•Construction Date: 1888
•Architect: Wm H Miller, CU; Warner, Burns, Toan & Lunde; Gunnar Burkirts
•Style: Richardsonian Romanesque; Modern
•Building Stone: Berea Sandstone (sandstone) from the Mississippian Period quarried in Northern Ohio; Holston Limestone (a.k.a. Tennessee marble) (limestone) from the Ordovician Period quarried in Tennessee; Red Levant (marble) from the Triassic Period in the A.D. White Library quarried in Spezia, Italy; Portage Redstone (sandstone) from the Cambrian Period quarried in Michigan (lower courses); (stairs) (note the pointed, pressure-solution “stylolites”)
To Andrew Dickson White, co-founder and first president of Cornell, “the ideas of a great university and a great library [were] inextricably linked.” Uris serves as the main University library with an emphasis on undergraduates. The libraries at the southern end of the Arts Quad serve the entire Cornell community. The University Library (now Uris Library) opened to the public in 1892, as the sole repository of the fledgling university’s books. Eighteen more libraries have since been constructed, including Olin, whose terrace looks out over the quad, and Kroch, accessible through Olin and built entirely below ground, with skylights on the southeastern corner of the quad supplying natural light.
The ceremonial opening of Uris Library was on October 7, 1891—the twenty-third anniversary of the day that classes began at the university—as the University Library. Its completion fulfilled A.D. White’s dream to create what he called, “the noblest structure in the land.” As the building was dedicated on that October afternoon, Cornell President Charles Kendall Adams noted: “To-day…we come together with glad hearts to celebrate the completion of what must for all time be the most important structure on these grounds.”
Designed by Cornell’s first architecture student, William Henry Miller, whose portrait hangs on the north wall of the lobby, the building featured an innovative design that allowed for convenient access to materials, and was, in White’s words, “a marvel of good planning, in which fitness is wedded to beauty.” He also considered it “the best academic library built.” Henry Van Brunt was the original architect and his Richardsonian Romanesque designs greatly influenced Miller’s final design. Miller won a competition which included Van Brunt and Charles Babcock. Miller’s work has been praised for its convenience, soaring tower, light-filled spaces, and the high quality of the masonry decoration. The rustication reflects the buildings of the Arts Quad, though a yellow, easily carved sandstone was used. Miller used an “Americanized” “modified Romanesque” or Richardsonian Romanesque style. The library cost over $200,000, and was the gift of Henry W. Sage in memory of Jennie McGraw Fiske, stemming from a period in University history known as the “Great Will Case.” The building forms the steeply sloping southwest corner of the Arts Quad where a library building was intended in the plan of 1866.
Uris Library is the university’s first dedicated library building and is considered to be architect William Henry Miller’s masterpiece. Miller’s architectural influence looms large on campus. In addition to the library, he designed four other major university buildings—Barnes Hall, Stimson Hall, Boardman Hall, and Risley Hall—as well as two fraternities, the A. D. White House, the Central Avenue Bridge, and Eddy Gate. Miller also designed numerous residential, business, and church buildings in Ithaca and the region.
The library is a cross-shaped structure with arcades of arches and squared windows. It is a “cruciform basilica” that features a large reading room—a “nave”—with excellent natural lighting from twenty-nine windows and twenty clerestory windows. For a university famously founded as a non-sectarian institution, the new library building was Andrew Dickson White’s “secular cathedral” devoted to books and learning.
Andrew Dickson White required a waterproof room for the 30,000 history and architecture books he donated from his personal library. The university’s collection consisted of an additional 84,000 volumes. Funds for the building and a book endowment were to come from the estate of Jennie McGraw (inherited from her father), but the will was contested by her husband Willard Fiske, former university librarian. Henry Williams Sage gave the money until the case was settled in Cornell’s favor.
Chimes donated by Jennie McGraw at the University’s opening in October 1868 stood at this site in temporary scaffolding before placement in the tower of McGraw Hall, built by her father John. The bells were finally installed in the new library tower.
The University Library was renamed Uris Library in 1962, after Harold D. Uris ’25. It was his gift which helped to finance the 1962 remodeling of the library. The renovations were done by O’Brian and Taube, a local architecture firm. Also in 1962, the Library Tower was named McGraw Tower, after John McGraw (Jennie’s father), that houses the Jennie McGraw Chimes. In 1982, the underground reading room was added, with seating for an additional 214 students. Designed by Gunner Birkerts, the addition was financed by Harold D. Uris’25, who gave $3 million through the Uris Brothers Foundation. The roof of the cocktail lounge is a terrace with plaques honoring generous donors throughout Cornell history.
Attached to the library is the underground reading room, commonly known as the “cocktail lounge,” which looks out over Libe Slope.
Three members of the Clemson Club swim team show off their “Never A Dry Moment” T-shirts outside Fike gym, Feb. 2, 2018. (Photo by Ken Scar)
Clemson University Reserve Officers’ Training Corps cadet Cameron Flinton holds a pair of combat boots to be used in a Fallen Soldier Battle Cross during the half time ceremony at the 2017 Military Appreciation Game in Memorial Stadium, Nov. 18, 2017. (Photo by Ken Scar)
Clemson University student Deavin Rencher, a sophomore studying special education and member of the Call Me MISTER program, reads with Tydarius Cobb, 9, at Uptown Barbers in Central, S.C., as part of the Razor Readers program. (Photo by Ken Scar)
Howard Hu, MD, MPH, ScD
Flora L. Thornton Chair
Department of Population and Public Health Sciences
(Photo by: John Davis)
original file name: 20211103_Davis_Keck_1268
Faculty, portrait
Use this one
Professors from Clemson University’s College of Education visit South Carolina’s so-called ‘Corridor of Shame’ during a listen and learn field trip to the area, March 6, 2018. (Photo by Ken Scar)
Andrew Dickson White Library
Andrew Dickson White, Cornell University’s co-founder and first president, built a great library. Although seldom identified today as one of the foremost collectors of the 19th century, his achievements have left a remarkable legacy. Unlike other famous book collectors of his time—J. Pierpont Morgan, Henry Edwards Huntington, John Jacob Astor, and James Lenox—he did not establish a separate institution to house his personal collections of books and manuscripts. Instead, White donated his entire collection of 30,000 books to the Cornell University Library—at a time when the Library possessed a collection of just 90,000 volumes. White’s great generosity reveals his utilitarian approach to collecting and, in his words, a “strong belief in the didactic value of books.” As an educator and historian he believed that one could not have a great university without a great library, and he wanted his books to be read and used by Cornell’s faculty and students.
White’s collections of materials on architecture, witchcraft, the Reformation, the French Revolution, Abolitionism and the Civil War were among the finest in the world during his lifetime. Originally shelved in the large, three-story room within Uris Library that bears his name, White’s collections are no longer kept together in one place. Many of his books were moved to the stacks in Olin Library when it opened in 1961. In recent years, most of White’s books have been transferred to the Division of Rare & Manuscript Collections for their continued protection and preservation. Today, the Andrew Dickson White Library holds a portion of the humanities and social science collections found in the combined Olin and Uris Libraries.
It is perhaps more fitting and accurate to say that Andrew Dickson White built two great libraries. The first was his large and significant personal book collection. The second was the Cornell University Library. White hired Willard Fiske to be Cornell’s first University Librarian, and he worked closely with him to develop innovative and progressive policies for their library. White purchased its first books, and played an active role throughout his life in developing the library’s collections.
Even in his student days, White had considered the merits of the most prestigious European libraries, imagining what it would be like to build an important new research library. White conceived and developed his vision for an upstate New York university during a miserable first year at college. White’s visions of a beautiful university were honed during his first year at a college whose architecture he called “sordid,” and later at Yale, where he urged classmates to “adorn and beautify the place.” While his classmates occupied themselves with shenanigans, the sixteen-year-old consoled himself in the library, where he found a book on the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. As a University of Michigan professor in the late 1850s, he planted elms and evergreens with the help of his students and was appointed superintendent of grounds. Two decades later he would preside over an institution that embodied the vision of his youth. The faculty included professors of modern history and literature, as well as classics and mathematics. They were free of control by religious sects and political parties. And learning was accomplished not by rote memorization and recitation, but through analysis, discussion, and experience. The Victorian beauty of the A. D. White Reading Room in Uris Library would probably have satisfied White’s exacting standards.
A trace of this inspiration can be found in the stained-glass windows that line the room. They portray the crests of several Oxford and Cambridge colleges. In the north windows, for instance, the blue escutcheon contains the motto for Oxford University, “Dominus Illuminatio Mea.” Translated from Psalm 27, it means, “The Lord is my Light.” Visitors from a new generation find the room’s ambiance comes from another source, calling it the “Harry Potter” library.
When White offered his personal library to the university, he set two conditions. He asked that the university provide a suitable space to house his collection—he stipulated a fire-proof room—and he requested that proper provision be made for the ongoing maintenance of his collections. That “suitable space” is the Andrew Dickson White Library. White played an active role in helping the building’s architect, William Henry Miller, design and ornament this space.
The maintenance and cataloging of the collection became the responsibility of George Lincoln Burr, a member of the Cornell class of 1871. Burr was White’s secretary and personal librarian as well as the first curator of the White Historical Library. Originally hired by White when he was a Cornell sophomore, Burr worked closely with White to develop and care for his library. We can safely posit that after 1879, the White collection must be seen as a collaborative effort between the two scholars. Each traveled to Europe on extended book-buying tours. Burr, also a renowned professor in the Cornell History department, is given special credit for building and enriching the Library’s collections on the Reformation and witchcraft.
Burr’s portrait by Cornell art professor Christian Midjo is prominently displayed on the north wall of the room, and a small drawing by R. H. Bainton on the first tier shows Burr as Cornell historian Carl Becker once described him: an “indefatigable scholar and bibliophile . . . browsing and brooding in the stacks.”
The Andrew Dickson White Library is filled with art work, furniture, and artifacts from White’s academic and diplomatic careers. He served as U.S. minister to Germany while still president of Cornell, and later also served as minister to Russia. Several pictures and photographs in the room depict Russian scenes. The artwork and the case of plaster casts of European coins and medallions were all collected by Mr. White.
Originally, this space had skylights and an open archway into the adjacent Dean Room (where the Burr portrait now hangs). Those features were lost to renovations, but the original three tiers of wrought-iron stacks still offer an open and dramatic display of their books. Upon first seeing these shelves filled with White’s books in September of 1891, George Lincoln Burr wrote that it “gave one such an idea of a multitude of books. You see and feel them all. They quite overawe one.” Setting the objective for the collection, he promised to make the White Library, in his words, “the great living, growing historical workshop of the University.
TRANS is the New Norm. What Will Your Child Grow Up To Be?
Trans is now the new norm.
Is it NORMAL to change your child’s identity?
They are born one way and society dictates something else.
Something else like Trans/Transgender, Trans Feminine/Trans Masculine, Trans Man/Trans Women, AsGender, Two Spirit, Multi-Gender, Gender Fluid, Gender Queer, etc.
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I made sure to get over to the STC from Trafalgar Campus before they started moving everything and everyone out.
The welding shops.
Hasselblad 500c - Carl Zeiss Distagon 50mm 1:4 - Fuji Acros 100 @ ASA-100
Kodak D-23 (Stock) 9:00 @ 20C
Meter: Pentax Spotmeter V
Scanner: Epson V700
Editor: Adobe Photoshop CC (2017)
Rima Habre, MSc, ScD and Lisa Valencia work in the Soto Street wet lab and perform air monitoring activities as part of environmental health research.
Pictured (from left): Lisa Valencia, Rima Habre, MSc, ScD
(Photo by: John Davis)
original file name: 20211103_Davis_Keck_1313
Faculty, staff, environmental health
The cast of Clemson University’s production of The Diviners, a play by Jim Leonard Jr., run through the show during a tech rehearsal in the courtyard of the Brooks Center for the Performing Arts, April 13, 2018. The production was originally slated to run in the blackbox theater inside the center, but was forced to tear down, reconstruct and hold performances outside in the courtyard when a colony of bats was discovered in the building. (Photo by Ken Scar)
Uris Library
•Construction Date: 1888
•Architect: Wm H Miller, CU; Warner, Burns, Toan & Lunde; Gunnar Burkirts
•Style: Richardsonian Romanesque; Modern
•Building Stone: Berea Sandstone (sandstone) from the Mississippian Period quarried in Northern Ohio; Holston Limestone (a.k.a. Tennessee marble) (limestone) from the Ordovician Period quarried in Tennessee; Red Levant (marble) from the Triassic Period in the A.D. White Library quarried in Spezia, Italy; Portage Redstone (sandstone) from the Cambrian Period quarried in Michigan (lower courses); (stairs) (note the pointed, pressure-solution “stylolites”)
To Andrew Dickson White, co-founder and first president of Cornell, “the ideas of a great university and a great library [were] inextricably linked.” Uris serves as the main University library with an emphasis on undergraduates. The libraries at the southern end of the Arts Quad serve the entire Cornell community. The University Library (now Uris Library) opened to the public in 1892, as the sole repository of the fledgling university’s books. Eighteen more libraries have since been constructed, including Olin, whose terrace looks out over the quad, and Kroch, accessible through Olin and built entirely below ground, with skylights on the southeastern corner of the quad supplying natural light.
The ceremonial opening of Uris Library was on October 7, 1891—the twenty-third anniversary of the day that classes began at the university—as the University Library. Its completion fulfilled A.D. White’s dream to create what he called, “the noblest structure in the land.” As the building was dedicated on that October afternoon, Cornell President Charles Kendall Adams noted: “To-day…we come together with glad hearts to celebrate the completion of what must for all time be the most important structure on these grounds.”
Designed by Cornell’s first architecture student, William Henry Miller, whose portrait hangs on the north wall of the lobby, the building featured an innovative design that allowed for convenient access to materials, and was, in White’s words, “a marvel of good planning, in which fitness is wedded to beauty.” He also considered it “the best academic library built.” Henry Van Brunt was the original architect and his Richardsonian Romanesque designs greatly influenced Miller’s final design. Miller won a competition which included Van Brunt and Charles Babcock. Miller’s work has been praised for its convenience, soaring tower, light-filled spaces, and the high quality of the masonry decoration. The rustication reflects the buildings of the Arts Quad, though a yellow, easily carved sandstone was used. Miller used an “Americanized” “modified Romanesque” or Richardsonian Romanesque style. The library cost over $200,000, and was the gift of Henry W. Sage in memory of Jennie McGraw Fiske, stemming from a period in University history known as the “Great Will Case.” The building forms the steeply sloping southwest corner of the Arts Quad where a library building was intended in the plan of 1866.
Uris Library is the university’s first dedicated library building and is considered to be architect William Henry Miller’s masterpiece. Miller’s architectural influence looms large on campus. In addition to the library, he designed four other major university buildings—Barnes Hall, Stimson Hall, Boardman Hall, and Risley Hall—as well as two fraternities, the A. D. White House, the Central Avenue Bridge, and Eddy Gate. Miller also designed numerous residential, business, and church buildings in Ithaca and the region.
The library is a cross-shaped structure with arcades of arches and squared windows. It is a “cruciform basilica” that features a large reading room—a “nave”—with excellent natural lighting from twenty-nine windows and twenty clerestory windows. For a university famously founded as a non-sectarian institution, the new library building was Andrew Dickson White’s “secular cathedral” devoted to books and learning.
Andrew Dickson White required a waterproof room for the 30,000 history and architecture books he donated from his personal library. The university’s collection consisted of an additional 84,000 volumes. Funds for the building and a book endowment were to come from the estate of Jennie McGraw (inherited from her father), but the will was contested by her husband Willard Fiske, former university librarian. Henry Williams Sage gave the money until the case was settled in Cornell’s favor.
Chimes donated by Jennie McGraw at the University’s opening in October 1868 stood at this site in temporary scaffolding before placement in the tower of McGraw Hall, built by her father John. The bells were finally installed in the new library tower.
The University Library was renamed Uris Library in 1962, after Harold D. Uris ’25. It was his gift which helped to finance the 1962 remodeling of the library. The renovations were done by O’Brian and Taube, a local architecture firm. Also in 1962, the Library Tower was named McGraw Tower, after John McGraw (Jennie’s father), that houses the Jennie McGraw Chimes. In 1982, the underground reading room was added, with seating for an additional 214 students. Designed by Gunner Birkerts, the addition was financed by Harold D. Uris’25, who gave $3 million through the Uris Brothers Foundation. The roof of the cocktail lounge is a terrace with plaques honoring generous donors throughout Cornell history.
Attached to the library is the underground reading room, commonly known as the “cocktail lounge,” which looks out over Libe Slope.
Teachers and students enjoy a picnic lunch after the Tigers Read event in the Clemson Indoor Practice Facility, May 3, 2018. The event celebrated the third year of the Tigers Read! Initiative, which is sponsored by Dabo Swinney’s All In Team Foundation and aims to prevent the decline in reading skills many students experience during summer months. (Photo by Ken Scar)
The Clemson University Rally Cats welcome 150 elementary school kids to the Tigers Read event in the Clemson Indoor Practice Facility, May 3, 2018. The event celebrated the third year of the Tigers Read! Initiative, which is sponsored by Dabo Swinney’s All In Team Foundation and aims to prevent the decline in reading skills many students experience during summer months. (Photo by Ken Scar)
The engraving depicts various torture methods, including the strappado and rack. Note the presence of the scribe, priest, and interrogator.
Two Clemson University Reserve Officers’ Training Corps cadets practice a combat carry technique during a community outreach training day on the Clemson campus, March 16, 2017. (U.S. Army Reserve photo by Staff Sgt. Ken Scar)
Kids at the Tigers Read event in the Clemson Indoor Practice Facility, May 3, 2018. The event celebrated the third year of the Tigers Read! Initiative, which is sponsored by Dabo Swinney’s All In Team Foundation and aims to prevent the decline in reading skills many students experience during summer months. (Photo by Ken Scar)
From the Cornell Chronicle:
Teaching Winery Opens on Campus
By Ted Boscia | April 2, 2009
With the snip of a grapevine, Susan A. Henry, the Ronald P. Lynch Dean of Agriculture and Life Sciences, opened the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) Teaching Winery before a large crowd of faculty, students, vintners and other guests April 1.
Cornell, long known for its viticulture (grape-growing) research, now claims the only university teaching winery in the eastern United States. The $900,000 facility promises to prepare students for careers in New York’s wine and grape industry, which ranks third nationally in wine production and includes more than 250 wineries across the state.
Ian Merwin, the Herman M. Cohn Professor of Horticulture, and Ramón Mira de Orduña, associate professor of enology, helped Henry unveil the 1,800-square-foot building. The winery, attached to the Cornell Orchards store, will act as the Ithaca hub for CALS’s new viticulture and enology undergraduate major, which enrolls roughly 30 students and draws on more than 50 faculty members from the horticulture, food science technology, plant pathology, and applied economics and management departments. Inside the winery, students will access cutting-edge equipment to learn the science and art of winemaking.
“The College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Teaching Winery represents a major enhancement to our Viticulture and Enology (V&E) program,” said Henry. “Having this facility in Ithaca is crucial for our undergraduates, who will gain from hands-on experience in winemaking and grape-growing.”
Previously, V&E students crafted wines in a makeshift lab on the mezzanine of Stocking Hall. At the ceremony, students offered tastes of experimental wines produced in a fall 2008 class. Nearby, Sabrina Lueck ’10, a V&E major, said, “I’m beyond excited to begin using all the winery’s beautiful equipment.”
The winery includes state-of-the-art fermentation tanks and a modern microbiological and chemical lab, elements needed for the storage of grapes and the preparation and analysis of wines. It will allow students and faculty convenient access to three acres of hybrid wine grapes at Cornell Orchards and is near the program’s Lansing vineyards, which grow more traditional varieties like Pinot Noir, Riesling and Chardonnay.
“The facility will be among the finest in the United States and will provide our students with the widest possible range of winemaking experience,” said Mira de Orduña.
Mira de Orduña thanked numerous wineries and companies that donated equipment, including de-stemmers, filters, barrels and tanks, and also enzymes, yeast, bacteria and fining agents used in the production of wine. He said, in particular, that oak barrels donated by Canton Cooperage of Lebanon, Ky., and that a custom-made WinePod fermenter by Provina of San Jose, Calif., would expose students to “both the most traditional and the latest equipment available in winemaking.”
Ted Boscia is a staff writer in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
U.S. Air Force Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, commander of Air Force Space Command and the highest ranking officer to graduate from Clemson’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program, talks to ROTC cadets in the Tillman Hall auditorium, Aug. 31, 2017. (Photo by Ken Scar)
If you're a fan of the Film Photography Project you'll know that they recently released their own Monobath! Well I finally got around to testing out the bottle I was sent and when I pulled out the first roll from the tank, I'll have to say I am pretty impressed! Though I did notice that the film base stayed that lovely TMAX purple, but the images speak for themselves! Wow!
Minolta Maxxum 7000 - Minolta AF 35-70mm 1:4 - Kodak TMax 100 @ ASA-100
FPP Super Monobath (Stock) 5:30 @ 20C
Scanner: Epson V700
Editor: Adobe Photoshop CC (2018)
Clemson Universtiy Air Force Reserve Officers’ Training Corps cadets stand to be recognized during a ceremony attended by U.S. Air Force Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, commander of Air Force Space Command and the highest ranking officer to graduate from Clemson’s ROTC program, in Tillman Hall, Aug. 31, 2017. (Photo by Ken Scar)
Cornell is depicted standing with a hat and cane in his right hand. His left hand rests on some documents on a tree stump He is wearing a long waistcoat and vest. The statue of Cornell was unveiled on June 19, 1919. Its base is made of Devonian Granite.
November 2, 2019
Widener Library tour.
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
USA
Photo by brucetopher
© Bruce Christopher 2019
All Rights Reserved
...always learning - critiques welcome.
Tools: Canon 7D & iPhone 6s.
No use without permission.
Please email for usage info.
Andrew Dickson White Library
Andrew Dickson White, Cornell University’s co-founder and first president, built a great library. Although seldom identified today as one of the foremost collectors of the 19th century, his achievements have left a remarkable legacy. Unlike other famous book collectors of his time—J. Pierpont Morgan, Henry Edwards Huntington, John Jacob Astor, and James Lenox—he did not establish a separate institution to house his personal collections of books and manuscripts. Instead, White donated his entire collection of 30,000 books to the Cornell University Library—at a time when the Library possessed a collection of just 90,000 volumes. White’s great generosity reveals his utilitarian approach to collecting and, in his words, a “strong belief in the didactic value of books.” As an educator and historian he believed that one could not have a great university without a great library, and he wanted his books to be read and used by Cornell’s faculty and students.
White’s collections of materials on architecture, witchcraft, the Reformation, the French Revolution, Abolitionism and the Civil War were among the finest in the world during his lifetime. Originally shelved in the large, three-story room within Uris Library that bears his name, White’s collections are no longer kept together in one place. Many of his books were moved to the stacks in Olin Library when it opened in 1961. In recent years, most of White’s books have been transferred to the Division of Rare & Manuscript Collections for their continued protection and preservation. Today, the Andrew Dickson White Library holds a portion of the humanities and social science collections found in the combined Olin and Uris Libraries.
It is perhaps more fitting and accurate to say that Andrew Dickson White built two great libraries. The first was his large and significant personal book collection. The second was the Cornell University Library. White hired Willard Fiske to be Cornell’s first University Librarian, and he worked closely with him to develop innovative and progressive policies for their library. White purchased its first books, and played an active role throughout his life in developing the library’s collections.
Even in his student days, White had considered the merits of the most prestigious European libraries, imagining what it would be like to build an important new research library. White conceived and developed his vision for an upstate New York university during a miserable first year at college. White’s visions of a beautiful university were honed during his first year at a college whose architecture he called “sordid,” and later at Yale, where he urged classmates to “adorn and beautify the place.” While his classmates occupied themselves with shenanigans, the sixteen-year-old consoled himself in the library, where he found a book on the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. As a University of Michigan professor in the late 1850s, he planted elms and evergreens with the help of his students and was appointed superintendent of grounds. Two decades later he would preside over an institution that embodied the vision of his youth. The faculty included professors of modern history and literature, as well as classics and mathematics. They were free of control by religious sects and political parties. And learning was accomplished not by rote memorization and recitation, but through analysis, discussion, and experience. The Victorian beauty of the A. D. White Reading Room in Uris Library would probably have satisfied White’s exacting standards.
A trace of this inspiration can be found in the stained-glass windows that line the room. They portray the crests of several Oxford and Cambridge colleges. In the north windows, for instance, the blue escutcheon contains the motto for Oxford University, “Dominus Illuminatio Mea.” Translated from Psalm 27, it means, “The Lord is my Light.” Visitors from a new generation find the room’s ambiance comes from another source, calling it the “Harry Potter” library.
When White offered his personal library to the university, he set two conditions. He asked that the university provide a suitable space to house his collection—he stipulated a fire-proof room—and he requested that proper provision be made for the ongoing maintenance of his collections. That “suitable space” is the Andrew Dickson White Library. White played an active role in helping the building’s architect, William Henry Miller, design and ornament this space.
The maintenance and cataloging of the collection became the responsibility of George Lincoln Burr, a member of the Cornell class of 1871. Burr was White’s secretary and personal librarian as well as the first curator of the White Historical Library. Originally hired by White when he was a Cornell sophomore, Burr worked closely with White to develop and care for his library. We can safely posit that after 1879, the White collection must be seen as a collaborative effort between the two scholars. Each traveled to Europe on extended book-buying tours. Burr, also a renowned professor in the Cornell History department, is given special credit for building and enriching the Library’s collections on the Reformation and witchcraft.
Burr’s portrait by Cornell art professor Christian Midjo is prominently displayed on the north wall of the room, and a small drawing by R. H. Bainton on the first tier shows Burr as Cornell historian Carl Becker once described him: an “indefatigable scholar and bibliophile . . . browsing and brooding in the stacks.”
The Andrew Dickson White Library is filled with art work, furniture, and artifacts from White’s academic and diplomatic careers. He served as U.S. minister to Germany while still president of Cornell, and later also served as minister to Russia. Several pictures and photographs in the room depict Russian scenes. The artwork and the case of plaster casts of European coins and medallions were all collected by Mr. White.
Originally, this space had skylights and an open archway into the adjacent Dean Room (where the Burr portrait now hangs). Those features were lost to renovations, but the original three tiers of wrought-iron stacks still offer an open and dramatic display of their books. Upon first seeing these shelves filled with White’s books in September of 1891, George Lincoln Burr wrote that it “gave one such an idea of a multitude of books. You see and feel them all. They quite overawe one.” Setting the objective for the collection, he promised to make the White Library, in his words, “the great living, growing historical workshop of the University.