Page:A bibliography of North Carolina, 1589-1956 - 1958.djvu/9



The North Carolina Collection in the University Library which serves as a basis for this bibliography traces its beginning from material assembled at Chapel Hill by the Historical Society of North Carolina. In the Society’s first report, published in 1845, collecting local publications is set forth as one of its main objects, and acquisition of thirty-two publications and eleven collections of manuscripts is recorded. A few of these volumes, inscribed with the name of the Society, survive on the shelves of the North Carolina Collection today. In 1869, Fisk Brewer, in the first printed report of the University Librarian, called attention to the need for preservation of state publications, stating that 218 volumes of state laws, legislative records, and law reports, as well as a collection of University history, had been acquired. A later society, chartered in Chapel Hill in 1875, issued a circular in which a plan was outlined "to collect and preserve historical material…especially such as pertain to North Carolina."

Provision of an endowment for a North Carolina Collection and its organization in a special department of the Library followed the appointment of Louis R. Wilson as Librarian in 1901. In almost every report, Wilson recommended collection and special treatment of state material. In 1905, he called attention to the need for an endowment of North Carolina literature. A response came from John Sprunt Hill, Class of 1889, who set up a fund for this purpose as part of the library endowment raised to match the Carnegie gift of a new building. During the fifty-two years that have passed since his first gift, Hill's interest in the Library, and especially in the North Carolina Collection, has been demonstrated by a series of endowments culminating during the period following 1947 in the gift of several business properties in downtown Chapel Hill. His belief in libraries, first stated in an Alumni Association address delivered at the University in 1903, became a lifetime credo. At that time, he deplored the lack of library facilities in the state and, particularly, of the source material which nourishes the scholar "who digs down to the bottom of research and brings out the pure gold…from the treasure houses of the world." He called on "some greathearted son or daughter of the Old North State [to] give our people a