Graduate Theological Union

California

Volunteers hand-carried three hundred thousand books into a library that wasn't finished yet.

historicalculture

In 1981, staff and volunteers moved three hundred thousand books into a building that was only partly built. It was phase one of a new library on a Berkeley hillside. Phase two waited until 1985 and finished in 1987, when the place was named the Flora Lamson Hewlett Library after the foundation behind it. Today it holds around five hundred twenty-nine thousand volumes, which makes it one of the largest theological libraries in the world. Before that, all those collections sat in a basement. The Graduate Theological Union had merged its member schools' libraries in 1969 and stacked them under the Church Divinity School of the Pacific. The consortium occupies buildings all over the Bay Area but actually owns only three of them. Most of its schools sit just north of the University of California campus, in a cluster of seminaries and study centers thick enough that the neighborhood picked up a nickname. People call it Holy Hill.

This is the first of 2 parts. The rest runs about 2 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
Volunteers and staff moved 300,000 books into the partially completed building.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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