Flashback
75 years ago
Lockwood’s library
This year, UB celebrates the 75th anniversary of the dedication of the original Lockwood Memorial Library and Thomas B. Lockwood’s gift of his magnificent collection of rare books and other precious items. The construction of a new library building grew out of two capital campaigns and Lockwood’s desire to see his collection placed in a library, rather than being dispersed through auctions and individual sales after his death.
As part of the 1920 capital campaign, an idealized plan for the new campus—the present-day South Campus—was put forth with a domed classical building located in the center of the campus. That building was assumed to be a library.
When UB launched a second capital campaign in 1929, one of the larger pledges came from local businessman and attorney Thomas B. Lockwood and his wife, Marion Birge Lockwood. The Lockwoods pledged $500,000 for the construction of a library to be named Lockwood Memorial Library in honor of their late fathers. Daniel Lockwood, a close personal friend of Grover Cleveland, had been a prominent attorney who served three terms in Congress before serving as United States attorney for the Northern District of New York. George Birge had headed the Birge Wallpaper Company and also was a founder of the Pierce Arrow Motor Car Company.
While UB was securing the current South Campus site and raising the funds needed to realize its plans for the site, Thomas Lockwood was assembling his personal library of about 3,000 volumes that had been acquired through auctions and purchases from dealers. It was Lockwood’s intention to present his collection of rare books to UB when Lockwood Memorial Library was constructed.
In 1930, the university accepted a campus plan prepared by architects E.B. Green and Son and Albert Hart Hopkins, and engaged Ralph Adams Cram, the supervising architect of Princeton University, as a consultant. The plan established the basic layout of the campus and guided its development into the 1950s.
Cram told the university that “The library, which is assured in the immediate future, is one of the most important buildings on the campus. It should be given a position of the utmost dignity and it should not be crowded up against other structures.” Green’s plan reflected the central location for Lockwood Memorial Library, a building he would design.
Thomas Lockwood often referred to the new library as “my library,” so, as claimed by Chancellor Samuel P. Capen, Lockwood was the “happiest man” at the building’s dedication on May 15, 1935. National press coverage described the building as “the last word in institutional luxury,” with such innovative features as recessed lighting in the ceiling of the reading room and something Green referred to as “air conditioning.” Lockwood’s rare book collection put UB in the ranks of Harvard and Yale.
The collection that Lockwood assembled, now housed in Special Collections of the University Libraries, includes the most important works of British and American literature. It features most of the titles produced by the great private presses, among them Kelmscott and Doves. It also includes all four of the Shakespeare folios printed in the 17th century, making UB one of a very small number of North American libraries to hold all four. Also donated by Lockwood was one of only three copies of the magnificent five-volume “English Bible” printed on vellum by Doves Press in 1903-05.
The Lockwood gift also contains a remarkable collection of signatures of presidents of the United States and a group of presidential medals issued by the U.S. Mint, a set of 150 bronze medals of Napoleon struck from 1796 to 1816, and 34 silver medals of the kings and queens of England from William I to George II.
In commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the dedication of the original Lockwood Memorial Library and Lockwood’s gift of his remarkable collection, the University Libraries have mounted an exhibit containing photographs, correspondence and selections from the Thomas B. Lockwood Collection. The exhibit presents the story of Lockwood’s life, the construction of Lockwood Memorial Library and nine decades of support to UB begun by Lockwood and continuing today with the generosity of his stepdaughter, Annette M. Cravens. The exhibit, in the Special Collections Research Room in 420 Capen Hall, will be on view through Sept. 30.
The Lockwood name was transferred to a new building on the North Campus in 1978, and the original Lockwood structure was renamed Charles D. Abbott Hall. It is now the home of the Health Sciences Library.
For more about Lockwood, see the finding aids for the Thomas B. Lockwood Papers), the Thomas B. Lockwood Book Collecting Records) and the Thomas B. Lockwood Antiquarian Book Catalog Collection.
—John Edens, University Archives
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