The First Gore

In the midst of the battle which briefly raged last month between Winthrop and Leverett House, a forty year old dormitory named Gore Hall gained fleeting public fame. Probably few of the contestants knew that the cause of the controversy had an ancestor also named Gore Hall. For eighty overcrowded years, it was the Harvard University Library.

In 1838 the University Library outgrew its 150-year old quarters and President Josiah Quincy determined to build a new library. After failing to get any money from the State Legislature, he received a large gift from Christopher Gore "to build an enduring monument to preserve the memory of Massachusetts' former Governor and Senator, Christopher Gore." Allegedly designed after King's College Chapel in Cambridge, England, the enduring monument, Harvard's new library, was built in a style euphemistically labeled by contemporaries as "Fourteenth Century Gothic."

By the time of the Civil War, however, the overseers discovered on a tour of the library that "of the Statutes of the United States there is no copy in the library, nor a tolerably good atlas, nor the works of Wordsworth, nor the lives of Judge Story or of Doctor Channing or of the Chancellors of England." Immediately they raised money to buy more books for the library. This was the beginning of the end for Gore Hall.

Its librarian, Mr. Sibley, bought up great quantities of books with the extra cash. Although Sibley, called the "guarding genius of the library," aimed to please distinguished men like Longfellow and Lowell who frequented Gore, he disliked students who "couldn't tell a book from a ball." Walking about "with a light tread and quick movement for a heavy man," he guarded his growing collection well, admonishing readers about doubling over pages and careless turning of the leaves.

One of his assistants, Mr. Nichols, was known as "the blind proofreader" because of his nearsightedness. Nichols once mistook a bird nest under the library's roof for a book he was trying to reach. After accidentally dislodging the nest, he called for pages to bring ladders and wasn't satisfied until both bird and nest were safely on the ground.

Sibley soon had filled the library with his purchases. After President Eliot announced in 1877 that, "The want of space in Gore Hall is a more and more oppressing evil," the building got its first renovation and a new librarian, Mr. Justin Winsor, as well. He revolutionized the library by installing stacks, the first in America, and starting a more frugal and practical policy of book purchasing.

Despite his efforts, the library was overcrowded again by 1895. A member of the Corporation came to the rescue and offered to build a new reading room, but died before contributing the cash. Finally, drawing from its unrestricted funds, Harvard remodeled again. Tearing down Gore's clustered columns, and a vaulted plaster ceiling, workmen made the reading room into an example of "uncompromising bareness and Spartan simplicity of furnishing."

But the change was only a makeshift. After ten more years, library conditions had once again become intolerable. When the Widener family offered to build a new library. University officials painfully decided to demolish Gore but used some of Gore's granite to help build Widener.

Three years later, in 1916, the new Gore Hall arose, and Christopher Gore's name lingered on as he had wished. But all that now remains to remind us of the first Gore Hall is some granite in the Walls of Widener, a piece of the reading room wall--preserved in Harvard archieves, and a squabble over its younger brother by the river.