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The Lincoln Collection at Brown had its beginnings in September 1855, when a young Westerner arrived at Brown, after a three-day journey from Indiana, to pursue an East Coast education. He could hardly have known it then, but John Milton Hay was to bring a lot more than his wit to the university he grew to love in the generations that followed his 1858 graduation.
In the early part of the 20th century, when the University was planning to build a new library to replace its existing outmoded structure, Andrew Carnegie offered to pay half the cost of construction if the University would name it in honor of John Hay, its most distinguished alumnus, then recently deceased. To President Faunce, the answer was simple and obvious. Hay’s devoted service in the Lincoln White House as Assistant Private Secretary to the President (for more about this, see the online exhibit “John Hay’s Lincoln”) rendered the idea of a Lincoln collection another self-evident decision for the University, but finding a Lincoln collection of sufficient depth and importance proved to be something of a challenge. In 1920, President Faunce learned that Hugh McLellan was about to put his father’s sizeable Lincoln collection up for auction. The McLellan Collection was then one of the five most distinguished Lincoln collections in the world. Faunce prevailed upon John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Class of 1897, to purchase the collection as a donation to the University. Rockefeller then funded the outfitting of a special room in the Hay Library to house the McLellan Collection, with cases designed by Hugh McLellan and made from quartered oak. Within five years, the McLellan Collection had outgrown this small space, and an adjoining room was furnished to match the first, providing additional space.
The McLellan Collection has been supplemented over the years by some major gifts of Lincoln and related materials, increasing the collection to more than five times its original size. During his lifetime, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. remained the principle benefactor of the collection, collecting and donating additional manuscripts, books, portraits and prints. The papers of Rush Christopher Hawkins, which included a number of Lincoln manuscripts, came to the University in 1948 with the collections of the Annmary Brown Memorial. In 2006, a major bequest from Maury A. Bromsen, the late Boston book dealer, added hundreds of prints, books, pamphlets and museum objects to the collection, along with a portrait of Lincoln by one of his associates, the printing plates for an important series of Confederate etchings and manuscripts of Civil War generals George B. McClellan and P.T.G. Beauregard. More recently, the collection has been the beneficiary of the interest and attention of Douglas W. Squires, Class of 1973. In the interim, the Library has received numerous other small donations of material pertaining to Lincoln and the Civil War; we encourage interested patrons to consult the Library’s A to Z list of Special Collections for details on some of these.
The Hay Library’s Lincoln rooms remain today much as they were when first set up in the 1920s, although they are no longer actively used as research space. They house a permanent display of paintings, sculpture and objects from the Lincoln Collection, and may be viewed upon request. Materials from the Lincoln Collection are made available for research use in the Hay Library’s main reading room. For further information or to arrange for a tour of the Lincoln rooms, please contact: hay@brown.edu.
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