Ezra Cornell annotated the first book he ever owned, which was S. Putnam Waldo's Memoirs of Andrew Jackson, Major-General in the Army of the United States and Commander in Chief of the Division of the South . Hartford: J. & W. Russell, 1819.
Francis Miles Finch helped Cornell draw up a charter for the Library Association. Finch was a native of Ithaca and a Yale-educated lawyer with the law firm of Boardman and Finch.
On February 5, 1863, members of the Village of Ithaca council met to consider the proposal of the Hon. Ezra Cornell to invest $15,000 in a lot and building to be used for a free library for the Village of Ithaca,
Annotated by Andrew Dickson White: "But Gov. Fenton was afraid of Methodists & Baptists & other sectarian enemies of the university and levanted the night before - leaving the duties to Lieut. Gov. Woodford who discharged the duties admirably. ADW"
The Cornell Library’s ledger for the first few years of Cornell University’s existence demonstrates the number of events held not on campus but at the Cornell Library in downtown Ithaca.
Many lectures, including those given by popular professors such as Goldwin Smith and Bayard Taylor, were held in downtown Ithaca at the Cornell Library.
"I sent to you at the Astor House a batch of introductory letters to Professors in Columbia Yale & Harvard and hope you received them and used them. If not - we must go together before long."
"If you were a woman, and had been disgusted, mortified, and exasperated as I have been by the talk of educated men about our capacity, or incapacity rather, & what had better be done with us; I might make you understand the satisfaction, gratitude, and delight with which I read your report. As it is you never can know anything about it. Please, can I have another copy? I cut the one you sent me into pieces for the Advertiser; I wish they could have spared room for the whole of it, but that was impossible, & I had no time to copy. I do want one to keep."
Copy of letter sent. "In answer to your letter first received, I would say that we have no colored students at the University at present but shall be very glad to receive any who are prepared to enter. Although there is no certainty of the entrance of any such students here during the present year, they may come and if even one offered himself and passed the examinations, we should receive him even if all our five hundred white students were to ask for dismissal on that account. The first African-American students, Charles Chauveau Cook, Jane Eleanor Datcher, and George Washington Fields graduated in 1890."
Included in a letter from White to Charles Kendall Adams, March 11, 1886. The plan suggested: (1) proposals for additions to McGraw Hall; (2) the preferred site on the east side of the Quadrangle; (3) an alternative site on the south side of the Quadrangle. At the southwest corner of the Quadrangle is a fourth alternative next to which White notes, Various methods of arranging this.
"At a meeting of the Library Building Committee, held last evening, it was decided to ask you to make studies of the library building, in accordance with instructions herewith enclosed. William Henry Miller, a noted Ithaca architect, was selected to build the University Library. Buildings for which he was responsible include the Andrew Dickson White House, Barnes Hall, Stimson Hall, and Risley Hall, as well as a number of churches and homes in Ithaca. He prepared plans for improving the south entrance to the University at Cascadilla Gorge, designing a new roadway closer to the gorge bank, an entrance gate at the end of Eddy Street, and a new stone-arched bridge across the gorge."
In 1911 two professorships were established for Martha Van Rensselaer and Flora Rose - the first full professorships granted to women at Cornell. This photograph shows Annette Warner, Flora Rose, and Blanche Hazard, all professors in home economics.
In the 1930s Cornell participated in a national program to provide jobs for German scholars displaced by the Nazi regime. President Farrand was chairman of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars. This letter from Edward R. Murrow concerns funds for the reappointment of Kurt Lewin, formerly a psychologist at the University of Berlin as acting professor of education at Cornell.
