College and Research Libraries


By ELBERT ]. BENTON 

The Western Reserve Historical 
Society and Its Library 
This picture of a local historical society and 
its library was prepared by the director and 
secretary of the society at the suggestion of 
College and Research Libraries. 

The Challenge 

S EVERAL YEARS ' AGO the Historical So-ciety of Pennsylvania issued a state-
ment of policy. The statement was a 
forthright discussion of the opportunities 
open to historical societies in general and of 
the policies which this Philadelphia organi-
zation had, after careful deliberation, de-
cided to follow. It indicated also that <the 
several historical societies in Philadelphia 
were trying to differentiate their fields. In-
cidentally, it was a challenge to other so-
cieties to clarify their aims. In line with 
this, and remembering that every such so-
ciety is an agency that must serve its com-
munity, I am going to try to give the 
record of achievements and the purposes of 
Cleveland's historical society. 

A Little History 

The society was founded in I 867. In 
the constitution the founders stated their 
objectives: "To discover, procure and pre-
serve whatever relates to the history, biog-
raphy, genealogy, antiquities and statistics 
connected with the City of Cleveland and 
the Western Reserve, and generally what 
relates to the history of Ohio and the Great 
West." T 'hey seemed to take as their field 
everything west of the Alleghenies. The 
name they adopted, however, appeared not 

DECEMBER_, 1944 

to define, in a wholly satisfactory way, the 
scope of their work. For many years the 
secretary issued the call for meetings in the 
name . of the "Western Reserve and North-
ern Ohio Historical Society." On the title 
page of the society's publications, "1'he 
W este:r:n Reserve" in small capitals occu-
pied one line and in the next line, the 
central point of the page was "And 
Northern Ohio Historical Society," in 
heavily leaded capitals, as though it were 
the real thing to be held in mind. As a 
matter of fact, "Western Reserve" is a 
geographical term that began to lose mean-
ing after the organization of the state of 
Ohio and ceased to have a significant 
place with the division of the territory 
that had been Connecticut's Western 
Reserve into counties and townships like 
other portions of Western states. As long 
as northeastern Ohio was occupied by a 
population predominantly from Connecticut 
stock the phrase had some purport to that 
group. But now it means just what "Cleve-
land" would mean in the name of an or-
ganization. Northeastern Ohio, the 
Western Reserve, is every part within sixty 
miles of Cleveland, and describes a metro-
politan area that the society would like to 
serve as other such agencies serve their 
community. As symbolic of this, the so-
ciety now has branches at Mentor (the 
Garfield Home) and at Unionville (the 
Harper Home). 

The chief organizers were Judge Charles 
C. Baldwin and Colonel Charles Whittle-

23 



sey. Both were me~ of broad .interests and 
long vision. From the first they planned a 
library, a museum, a forum for discussion 
of historical subjects by the members, public 
lectures, and publications, and every part of 
this program was observed in practice 
throughout their times. Whittlesey, the 
first president, was for many years em-
ployed by the United States in the survey 
of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and 
particularly in the exploration of the cop-
per and iron resources of the region. He 
was a prolific writer on the resources of the 
Great Lakes region. Baldwin, the second 
president and for many years secretary, ex-
pressed his collecting interests in purchas-
ing early maps of Ohio, the Great Lakes, 
North America, and, in fact, of the entire 
field of the explorers of the Americas. His 
was a splendid collection of cartography. 
The homes of both founders indeed were 
small museums. The collections of both 
were given to the society which they 
founded-archeological specimens, maps, 
manuscripts, pamphlets, and books of their 
own authorship. Seldom have two such 
prolific writers combined to found a his-
torical society. 

As organized in 1867, the society was a 
department of the Cleveland Library As-
sociation (later known as Case Library) 
and remained so until it took out a state 
charter as an independent body in 1892. 
The parent association started the society 
off, as a good parent should, with some of 
the old home place-a gift of the books 
the association held on local and Ohio his-
tory. That gift made it a going concern 
as a history library from the outset. Many 
of the early members added private col-
lections to fill museum cases. Still it was 
relatively a small institution housed in one 
room until 1892. From the first days two 
purposes prevailed-to build a library and a 
museum, the one to provide both the raw 
materials of history and the finished prod-

ucts, the other to preserve illustrative ob-
jects which would vitalize history. 

In the early years the society's members 
met in private homes for business, discus-
sions, and lectures. Such activities consti-
tuted a very prominent feature. The 
lectures were published as tracts of the 
society. After the society built at U niver-
sity Circle, it had for a few years a hall for 
such purposes. However, by 1914 the 
crowded conditions of the building com-
pelled the trustees to use this for book stacks. 
The loss of the hall and the competition of 
other agencies around University Circle 
offering lecture series, caused the abandon-
ment of both the forum and the lectures. 
Publications, several a year, were continued 
until the depression of the 1930's cut the 
society's resources. A publication fund 
established in 1942 has made possible in a 
limited way the revival of one of the most 
marked features of the early days, the pro-
motion of productive scholarship. Some of 
the more popular of the early publications 
are still in print and in demand as well. 

The Library 

I. Maps. The library contains four main 
divisions, devoted respectively to maps, 
manuscripts, newspapers, and printed works, 
including books and pamphlets. The core 
of the map and atlas collection was assem-
bled by Baldwin. There are a great num-
ber of manuscript maps of Western Reserve -
townships and the original surveys of the 
Connecticut Land Company, representing 
nearly every township. In addition there 
are numerous early maps of Ohio towns. 
The society supplemented these with atlases 
and maps that came in purchases and gifts. 
In 1943 President Norton gave one of the 
rare early Cleveland maps. There are 
nearly five hundred photostatic copies of 
maps in the Bibliotheque N ationale. There 
are about four hundred atlases. Atlases and 
maps have all been fully cataloged. 

24 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES 



2. Manuscripts. Presidents Whittlesey 
and Baldwin not only gave the society· the 
manuscripts in their own files of correspond-
ence and of private papers but aggressively 
sought those of their friends and associates. 
In the early years the Cuyahoga County 
commissioners financed for the society the 
purchase of the records of the Connecticut 
Land Company-maps, deeds, correspon-
dence, and the field notes of the company's 
surveyors. 1lhe records of the secretary, 
Ephraim Root, were also obtained by the 
society. 1Laken together it was a prize col-
lection for a society which took as its small-
est allotted field the Western Reserve and 
constituted indeed a priceless manuscript 
collection. The papers of the agents of the 
land company · resident in the reserve came 
in later as a matter of course. 1lhere were 
those of 1lurhand Kirtland, Abram 1lappan, 
Simon Perkins, Peter and Reuben Hitch-
cock, and others, the correspondence, jour-
nals, diaries, account books, surveys, and 
maps complementing the records of the 
Connecticut Land Company proper. These, 
with others which the families of the pio-
neers have given, cover business and social 
life on the reserve from I 79 5 to the Civil 
War. 

The list of manuscripts would be very 
large. Wallace H. Cathcart, who as direc-
tor of the society had a major part in build-
ing up the collections, once estimated the 
number at one million items. Elisha Whit-
tlesey, of Canfield, Ohio, uricle of Charles 
Whittlesey and a Whig politician and con-
gressman for many years, left some ninety 
thousand letters, mostly correspondence 
with his party associates. As late as I9I6 
the director could report to the trustees that 
the society had received the John May 
papers, a body of manuscripts pertaining to 
the affairs of the Connecticut Land Com-
pany and the Ohio Land Company, ranging 
in dates from I 787 to I 8 II. The Governor 
Allen Trimble papers contain a large body 

DECEMBER .. 1944 

of . early surveys of the Virginia Military 
District in Ohio, embracing land warrants 
and maps. The correspondence and papers 
of Ephraim Brown, founder of Bloomfield, 
Ohio, the recollections and other papers of 
Leonard Case, and the diary of his son, Wil-
liam, illustrate items that are too numerous 
for enumeration. They are exceptionally 
valuable for the place and the time they 
represent. 

The William P. Palmer collection in-
cludes a vast number of letters, diaries, 
journals, and other papers on Southern life 
on plantations and on slavery and the Civil 
War. Thet e are, for example, five volumes 
of the journals of the Chamouni and the El 
Destino plantations in Louisiana, I842-55. 
The Bragg papers of the Civil War, mili-
tary correspondence largely, are only an 
illustration of the Civil War materials in 
manuscript form. More striking is the 
Shaker manuscript collection consisting of 
letters, diaries, journals, and records of 
every form, and representing nearly all of 
the nineteen separate Shaker communities. 
It is unique in size and also in the form in 
which the Shaker ministry preserved its rec-
ords for the posterity of "the world" from 
which it wished to escape. The manuscripts 
came to the society both bound and legible. 

The manuscript division contains a large 
body of local business records, those of the 
Cleveland iron companies being among the 
most prominent. Among these are the rec-
ords of the first iron works in the city-
the Cuyahoga Steam Furnace Company. 
In recent years the letters and other papers 
of Senator Theodore Burton, long-time 
representative from Cleveland in Congress, 
and those of Myron T. Herrick, close as-
sociate of McKinley and governor and 
ambassador to France, have come to the 
society. The McKinley letters and the 
ambassador's correspondence in the years 
I9I3-I4 and I92I-29 are a rich mine for 
American historians. 

25 



J. Newspapers. The newspaper division 
of the library contains more than twenty-
five thousand bound volumes and thousands 
more of unbound and partial or fragmen-
tary files. Photostatic copies of many news-
papers published in the American colonies 
have been purchased. The division was 
greatly extended by the Palmer collection, 
with about twenty-two thousand issues pub-
lished in the Confederate States of America. 
There are unbroken files of all of the lead-
ing Cleveland newspapers and of many 
other Ohio cities. Ther.e is an almost com-
plete file of one of the oldest Ohio news-
papers, the Scioto Gazette~ from I80I-57; 
an extensive run of the Liberty Hall and 
Cincinnati Gazette~ I8I2-37; and one of the 
Ohio State Journal from I826 to date. 
The Trump of Fame~ I8I2-I6, and the 
Western Reserve Chronicle~ i8I6~ I920, 
give the society an almost complete news-
.paper record of Warren, Ohio, and Trum-
bull County. The file for Elyria, Ohio, is 
practically complete. But the collection is 
in no sense limited to Ohio towns. For the 
National I ntelligencer., Washington, D.C., 
there is an almost complete set of the tri-
weekly for I8oo-6I and of the daily from 
I 8 I 3-69. The file of New England news-
papers is extensive. The Columbian Cen-
tinel~ Boston, is almost complete for I 788-
I 820. There are runs of the New York 
Herald for I8o2-I4, I86o-96, of the New 
York Times for I86o-96 and I9I2-27, and 
of the Tribune for I 845-96. By exchange 
of duplicates the society acquired the Lon-
don Chronicle for an important period of 
American histdry, I757-I8oo. 

4· Periodicals ., The society in its periodi-
cal collection, closely related to the news-
paper collection, emphasizes the preservation 
of the national, regional, and state historical 
magazines. While it has extensive files of 
many periodicals, like Harper~s Weekly., it 
does not intend to develop a periodical divi-
ston m competition with those at Western 

Reserve University and the Cleveland Pub-
lic .Library. In this respect there is a 
fairly definite understanding with those in-
stitutions. 

5. Books. Books and pamphlets consti-
tute the major division of the library. The 
society does not have an accurate count of 
the number of books and pamphlets on its 
shelves. Mr. Cathcart put it at four hun-
dred thousand. There are, however, prob-
ably twenty-five thousand duplicates. 
Purchases had a larger share in building 
the library proper than any other part of 
the society's collections. This came about 
because Mr. Cathqut pushed vigorously 
his policy of making the library serve his-
torical scholarship. But he also visited 
older and greater libraries and was remark-
ably successful in persuading librarians to 
give duplicates to his society. He went to 
Washington and to many state capitals for 
files of public documents that were still 
available. The sections of the library on 
colonial and state public records were built 
up in this manner and are now quite com-
plete. Also, the library was a depository for 
the government serial set until I900, and 
its file for the first thirteen Congresses is one 
of the most extensive in the United States. 

It is of passing interest that Mr. Cathcart 
began his collecting care~r as a student at 
Denison University, assembling everything 
he could secure by gift or purchase bearing 
on the history of the Baptist Church in 
Ohio. His interests broadened as he pro-
ceeded and came to include other denomina-
tional publications. How could he remain 
a Baptist without knowing why he couldn't 
be something else ! This was typical of his 
whole career as a bookman. He had, before 
he finished, built up an extensive library of 
American church records, including notable 
collections of Mormon and Shaker litera-
ture. In fact, the Cathcart Shaker collec-
tion is the finest of its kind anywhere. It 
is a mass of material, as yet almost unex-

26 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES 



plored by scholars, on the social conditions 
of a peculiar people, but throwing light on 
the social conditions of pioneers in many 
parts of the United States. 

6. Special Collections. . William P. 
Palmer, president of the American Steel and 
Wire Company, was president of the society 
from 1913-28. His private collection of 
books, pamphlets, newspapers, and manu-
scripts on slavery, the Civil War, and Lin-
coln was given to the society. Two recent 
gifts of Lincolniana, one by Mrs. George 
R. Lamb, whose husband had made a col-
lection, and another by the daughters of 
Stephen W. Tener, have filled many gaps 
in the Palmer library. The section consti-
tutes one of the society's richest stores of 
sources and secondary works. Among the 
accessions which would be found in any 
important national listing are Judge Henry 
C. White's collection of Arctic exploration; 
Charles G. King's books on the history of 
costume, international in scope and of every 
age; and the D. Z. Norton library of 
Napoleonic works, outstanding in the 
United States and, because the volumes are 
beautifully bound, a joy to behold. (For 
an appraisal, see John H. Stewart's Guide 
to Materials in Cleveland~ I7I5-I8I5~ p. 
27!.) 

Special Support 

In the golden era of universities and 
privately-supported institutions which fol-
lowed World War I, Mr. Cathcart was 
very successful in securing special support 
for his program of book buying. Certain 
members of the society agreed to under-
write considerable annual purchases, each 
on a subject in which he had a personal 
interest. For example, Samuel Mather 
financed for several years the purchase of 
such English parish registers as could be 
found. F. F. Prentiss authorized the se-
curing of books on Ohio history; William 
McLauchlan, those on Maine; L. A. M ur-

DECEMBER~ 194f 

fey, those on Pennsylvania; J eptha H. 
Wade, those on New Jersey; Henry S. 
Sherman, those on Mormonism; Ralph 
King, those on costume; Mrs. Louis J. 
Smith, those on genealogy; Cyrus S. Eaton, 
those on the American loyalists; H. A. Ful-
ler, those on California; and the Van Swer-
ingen brothers, those on Virginia and 
Maryland and later on genealogy as well. 
In that way many gaps that had developed 
from the voluntary giving of books were 
filled. It was the most fruitful of the di-
rector's policies toward the systematic as-
sembling of a great library. It lasted until 
the great depression of the thirties put an 
end to book buying on a large scale. Mr. 
Cathcart, himself, built up for the society 
by exchange and ·purchase, an outstanding, 
almost perfect, collection of early Ohio 
laws, besides that of the early congressional 
documents already mentioned. Other spe-
cial collections which have come to the 
society are Palmer's on the Lewis and Clark 
expedition, Otto Miller's on the War of 
1812, Franklin S. Terry's on World War 
I, Cyrus S. Eaton's on the French and 
Indian Wars, with many rare books and 
pamphlets, and Charles C. Baldwin's collec-
tion of early imprints. 

Genealogy 

The section on genealogy contains some 
fifteen thousand volumes on individual 
American families, .besides general material, 
society publications, and vital records. It is 
one of the most active parts of the library, 
requiring the full-time services of a genealo-
gist. Limitation of space here precludes a 
description of the accumulation of deeds, 
legal papers, land grants, and broadsides 
which have drifted in over the years. The 
Brody amateur newspapers and the early 
American prints, especially of Ohio and 
Civil War music (sheet and broadsides), 
are outstanding. 

7· The Catalog. The library has been 

27 



fully listed, being in almost all cases fully 
classified and cataloged; and although much 
remains to be done before the society can 
boast a perfect catalog of its collections, 
many research workers comment upon the 
utility of the catalog and are amazed . at its 
completeness. The staff is small, but every 
effort is made to give reference service by 
telephone, by mail, and in the library itself. 
Interlibrary loans are made, with the usual 
exceptions observed by rare-book libraries; 
and photostat and film service is supplied 
by a commercial firm. The library's hold-
ings are listed in the Union List of Serials_, 
the Union List of Newspapers_, Cleveland 
Regional Union Catalogue_, and the com-
mon bibliographical tools. In addition to 
the main book catalog, the library main-
tains a separate manuscript catalog, a news-
paper checklist, a periodical checklist, a 
Shaker catalog and membership list, a cos-
tume catalog, a broadsides catalog, an 
almanac checklist, a portrait index, a map 
and atlas catalog, a coat of arms index, and 
many others, all of which are useful bibliog-
raphies in themselves. 

New Quarters 

The mushroomlike growth of the library 
in the first quarter of the twentieth century 
absorbed the space intended for the museum, 
just as it had that allotted to a lecture hall. 
The balance was not restored until in recent 
years ( I939-4I) when the president of the 
society, Laurence H. Norton, conceived the 
plan and arranged for the purchase of two 
l_arge residences on East Boulevard, facing 
·wade Park, and the transfer of the library 
into one of them and the museum into the 
other. The new site has ample space for 
several additional buildings, enough to meet 
any needs now foreseen. One of the build-
ings, the McKinney house, originally built 
by Mrs. John Hay for her Cleyeland home, 
and for many years the residence of the 
Price McKinney family, provides the so-

~iety with twenty-six exhibition rooms, an 
assembly hall, work rooms, and storage 
space, and now constitutes the main part of 
the museum. The building is an impressive 
structure, surrounded by beautiful patios 
and gardens. The other residence, adjacent 
to the Hay-McKinney house, and connected 
with it by passageways, was built by Harry 
Payne Bingham in I 9 I 8 and occupied later 
by the Leonard C. Hanna, Sr., family for 
many years. Like the museum building, 
the library building is Florentine in style. 
The two harmonize with each other and 
have a setting of terraces and formal gar-
dens, which are much used in the summer 

· season by visitors and for social occasions. 
Twenty-two rooms· and a basement are now 
occupied by the library collections. Since 
moving to the new site the museum has 
grown as the library had in earlier years, 
until it may be said to have taken its old 
place as one of the society's major services to 
the public. 

Permanent Exhibitions 

Certain rooms in the museum are set 
aside for permanent exhibitions. Two are 
given to the D. Z. Norton Napoleonic col-
lection, one to the George W. Bierce Wash-
ingtoniana, another to Mr. Bierce's early 
American lighting exhibits, several to period 
costumes, one to Shaker relics, and others 
to objects representative of early American 
homes, shop tools, and farm utensils. In 
the wing given over to an exhibition of the 
handicrafts of Indians, Eskimos, Mexicans, 
and Peruvians, is the exceptionally fine col-
lection of pre-Inca pottery presented to the 
society by William H. Hunt. The museum 
is more than an institution with static ex-
hibitions, that is, with all exhibits on perma-
nent showing. Many of its rooms are 
changed every few days or weeks. A large 
portion of the collection is kept in storage 
rooms to be placed on exhibition in rotation, 
to use for special events, to illustrate special 

28 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES 



subjects, or to go out on loan. The society's 
large accumulations of stamps, coins, paper 
money, and medals are just now being inte-
grated, classified, and otherwise prepared 
for use in rotating exhibits. The same is 
true of the extensive collections of prints, 
photographs, and posters. Some of these are 
notable. Examples are the Ambrose Swasey 
gifts of freshly minted coins, many of them 
never in circulation; the S. Houghton Cox 
stamp collection; the]. D. Cox, Sr., Wash-
ington medals and Washington prints; Dr. 
H. K. Cushing's Franklin prints; and the 
William P. Palmer Civil War portraits and 
battle scenes. Again as in the cases of the 
major manuscript collections, this list gives 
a vague idea of the hundreds of thousands 
of objects which make up a museum. 

An Educational Institution 

A museum is an educational institution. 
It undertakes to visualize human events by 
the use of" relics, facsimiles, dioramas, and 
pictures. In effect it constitutes an exten-
sion of the local educational system. In the 
case of this society, thousands of school chil-
dren come to the museum for illustrative 
lessons in history. Special exhibitions are 
assembled to meet the needs of such classes. 
These may be of a pioneer home, of the 
costumes and furnishings of a particular. 
period, or of the working tools or machines 
of some time or event which the classes in a 
school are at the moment studying. The 
opportunities for the use of such instru-
11}-ents of popular education, be it for schools, 
clubs, adults, or juveniles, are boundless. 
The museum is in fact the dynamic part of a 
modern historical society. It can adapt its 
policies to the changing needs of a com-
munity. There was a time when, in the 
present instance, the emphasis of the society's 

DECEMBER~ 1944 

search for museum material was on the 
Indian relics and archeology in general. 
Then the time came when it is obvious the 
officers were thinking of the pioneer living 
conditions of the white man's frontier. The 
objects . that came to the society were of 
rural or small village life. The Cleveland 
of modern times is a great lake port, iron 
center, and industrial community. It is 
natural that the emphasis should now be 
shifting to the collection of materials which 
have to do with shipping on the Great 
Lakes and with manufacturing. 

In the Postwar Period 

The Western Reserve Historical Society 
faces postwar conditions knowing that it 
will have a vital part to play. It will offer 
the community a library rich in the raw 
materials of historical research and many 
rare printed works. It has a staff eager 
and able to assist visitors in their research, 
and to give any and all the latest conclu-
sions of others' research in the history of the 
United States. Through its museum it will 
be prepared to visualize the life of the past 
in innumerable aspects. The entire com-
munity will be served as only a few metro-
politan areas can be. Careful consideration 
is being given to the relations of the society's 
activities with those of the other cultural 
agencies in Cleveland. The purchasing 
officers of the Cleveland Public Library, of 
Western · Reserve Unive~sity, and of the 
society, are in constant communication in 
order to avoid needless duplication and to 
clarify their respective fields. The officers 
of all Cleveland museums have an ·inter-
museum teommittee or council to keep clear 
their respective museum activities. By co-
operation of all these forces there should 
develop cultural forces of a high order. 

29