Peter J. Blodgett

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Peter J. Blodgett | Using Our Faculties: Collecting the Papers of Western Historians at the Huntington Library | The Western Historical Quarterly, 34.4 | The History Cooperative

USING OUR FACULTIES: COLLECTING THE PAPERS OF WESTERN HISTORIANS AT THE HUNTINGTON LIBRARY

Among its many collections documenting the history of the Far West, the Huntington Library holds the papers of various western historians. Although such collections present certain inherent challenges, they also can offer significant contributions to the study of the region.

IN 1919, HENRY EDWARDS HUNTINGTON, Southern California land and railroad magnate, established the institution that bears his name. Since its founding, it has achieved international renown for the magnificence of its botanical gardens and its public exhibitions. The research facilities of the Huntington Library, though less well known to the general public, have achieved equal fame among all students of British and American history and literature. The library's holdings, like many other collections of rare books and manuscripts assembled by wealthy collectors, reflect the tastes and passions of its patron. Unlike most collectors, however, Huntington envisioned not merely a private storehouse of personal treasures, but also a great library that would support advanced scholarly research.

To realize his vision, Huntington committed himself early in his career as a collector to the purchase of entire libraries and large groups of personal papers, even if the contents seemed rather mundane. Thus, he gathered a collection of Western Americana notable for its comprehensiveness, as well as for the rarity of its contents. That search for comprehensiveness has characterized the library's acquisitions policy since Huntington's time. Today, the library's collection of historical manuscripts, books, photographs, prints, and ephemera encompasses the exploration, settlement, and development of the Far West from the Rockies to the Pacific Coast.

Within the scope of its efforts to document the region's history, the Huntington has also acquired the papers of various students of the West. Beginning with the donation of the voluminous correspondence and research files of Frederick Jackson Turner following his death in 1932, the library has obtained materials from more than a score of western historians over the past seven decades. As a result, it has gathered a body of manuscripts encompassing amateurs and professionals of every stripe and degree, from scholars of the relentlessly parochial to those possessing the broadest vision imaginable of the West. Taken as a whole, such collections reflect the unfolding efforts in the twentieth century to interpret America's western experience and its influence upon the nation as a whole.¹

Like all of the resources of the Huntington, the acquisition of these collections has been intended to advance scholarship in a particular sphere. For our researchers, they have sustained biographies of western historians, studies of historiographical trends, profiles of various institutions that employed or nurtured individual historians, and even inquiries based upon the notes and documents compiled by earlier scholars in the course of their careers. Capitalizing upon these raw materials for any of these purposes, however, can prove more challenging than might be expected because of certain traits shared by nearly all such collections.

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