Scribes, Scholars and Students
Preservation of Knowledge and the University Libraries
The beginning of the University of Tennessee and its libraries starts with the establishment of Blount College in 1794. The school’s first president and sole instructor, Samuel Carrick, provided his students access to his personal library. In addition to textbooks of spelling, grammar, geography, and literature, the library likely had volumes on philosophy, religion, law, astronomy, and natural history.
The school’s library grew slowly during the antebellum period. By 1839, the library held “3,000 well selected Volumes.” Students could borrow two books for a two week period, while faculty, trustees, and donors were allowed one month. The library’s collections were not kept together.
Two flourishing literary societies, the Chi Delta and Philomathesian Society, held portions of the collections in separate reading rooms, while the majority of the books were housed in a main reading room in Old College.
The Civil War nearly destroyed the school’s library. The Battle of Fort Sanders in late 1863, left East Tennessee University in shambles; campus buildings were uninhabitable if not destroyed, trenches and earthworks gouged the slopes of the Hill, and the library, scientific equipment, and geological collections had been damaged.
Afraid of another invasion, the board of trustees gained approval from the Union forces to “take charge of the books and apparatus of the University, and remove them to a place of security.”
During the presidency of Charles Dabney, 1887-1904, the library entered the modern age. In 1894, the library moved from Old College to the recently completed Science Hall. Library users located books through an author-based card catalog system with Dewey Decimal call numbers.
In 1901 Dabney launched an effort to obtain a monetary gift from Andrew Carnegie to build a new library building. His successor President Brown Ayres led the project to fruition and in 1911 the Carnegie Library, with room for 75,000 volumes, opened on the Hill. By the early 1920s, campus demands stretched the capacity of the Carnegie Library.
In 1931, a central library replaced the Carnegie Library. Designed by Knoxville architects Barber & McMurry, the building featured collegiate-Gothic architecture. The library, named for President James D. Hoskins in 1950, quickly filled to capacity.
A $1 million addition completed in 1959 nearly doubled the total square footage of the building, added seating capacity to handle well over 1,200 students, and expanded the volume capacity to 700,000. The Hoskins Library served as the central campus library until 1987.
Exhibit Topics
Early Print Culture and
the Written Word at the University of Tennessee
The Preservation of Knowledge
and the University Libraries
The Contributions of
Professor James Douglas Bruce
Medieval and Renaissance
Resources in Special Collections
