Princeton University Library
or The College of New Jersey as
it Was Then
Like Wellesley, the Princeton page is a little light on history. On the other hand the squirrel is worth contemplating, particularly if you know what the Princeton mascot is. The library page is likewise a little light on the historical side, although I do like the design.
Most of what follows I have drawn from the article on pages 99-104 of the Report. The College of New Jersey was chartered in 1746, and a library started forthwith. Typical of practice of the day the library depended on gifts for any increase in holdings. Remember this was before the great 19th Century overhaul in higher education. The library was housed in Nassau Hall which burned in 1802. The College raised $32,000 in cash, and a considerable number of books, to replace the destroyed collection. The new library was housed, with the geological museum, in Philadelphian Hall. This was just as well, because Nassau Hall burned again in 1855. It seems to have been an unlucky place. By the time of the Report the library held 29,500 volumes.
The necessity of a separate library building had been obvious for some time, and Mr. John C. Green of New York put up $120,000 for the construction of the building pictured below in 1872-1873. I particularly like the feature described here:
It is an octagonal building, with wings to the east and west, 140 feet in its entire length, with a central elevation of about 50 feet. The centre of the hall is occupied by a platform 12 feet in diameter, upon which is a circular desk for the librarian.
Sounds a little bit like the bridge of the Enterprise. The librarian was not named Picard, however, but Frederick Vinton, late of the Library of Congress. Interestingly enough at the time of construction of the building, "a fund was provided for the support of the librarian." [page 103] Somebody was smart enough to figure out that these things don't run themselves.
The building became known as the Chancellor Green building, and still exists. It seems to house a pizza place now, which is kind of a comedown.
Steve Ferguson, Curator of Rare Books at Princeton kindly provided me with URLs of two articles about Princeton libraries, one by William S. Dix here, and another by Ferguson himself here. Ferguson's account includes a picture of the interior of the building, and the following description:
Still standing today on its original site, as are all the homes of the Library since 1758, the Chancellor Green Library is an octagonal structure, well done in the high Victorian Gothic style of its day. It was designed by the New York architect William A. Potter. Its building form gives a material body to the concept of the circle of knowledge. For the octagonal structure is chiefly a large open room, identical in nature to the main reading room of the British Library and the Library of Congress.
By the 1890s the building was overflowing, and a new library (Pyne, roughly 1904) was built to serve as the university library. I've placed a picture of Chancellor Green as it exists today below the 1876 image
The Chancellor Green Library, Princeton, 1873-1897
