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History of the Library
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The Corrigan Memorial Library: Pages of HistoryThe theological library of Saint Joseph’s Seminary traces its origins to the early years of seminary formation for the Archdiocese of New York, when for two decades, from 1841 to 1861, students for the priesthood were educated at the site of what later became Fordham University of the Bronx, New York. When in 1864 Archbishop John Hughes founded Saint Joseph’s Provincial Seminary in the upstate New York city of Troy, a modest collection of books accumulated years earlier for the Fordham seminary passed to this school that served as a house of priestly formation not only for the New York archdiocese but for five other nearby dioceses as well (Albany, Hartford, Boston, Burlington and Portland, Maine).
The Troy seminary had two libraries, one for the faculty (the bibliotheca major) and one for the students (the bibliotheca minor). The volumes from both of these collections were in turn sent south to Yonkers, New York for the foundation in 1896 of the present-day Saint Joseph’s Seminary located on Yonkers’ Valentine Hill. Originally, the library for the Yonkers seminary was located directly under the central bell tower of the massive stone edifice that Archbishop Michael Corrigan had erected for New York’s future priests. A description written shortly before the official opening of the seminary in August of 1896 provides the details:
“The library is situated on the third floor, in the center of the building, and runs up to the fourth floor in height. It is approached by the grand staircase which you see on entering the building, and by the corridors of the third and fourth floors...It is a very large room, being seventy-six feet long and sixty-five feet in width… The alcoves are furnished with tables and electric lights, and everything has been done to make it one of the most attractive rooms in the seminary.” [1]
This large, high-ceiling room had fireproof book stacks in two tiers, with the book stacks on the upper tier accessed by balconies and stairs. There were two additional rooms elsewhere in the seminary that served as reading rooms, one for the faculty and the other for students.
At its opening, the library’s collection comprised about 7000 volumes, enriched by Archbishop Corrigan’s donation of two important collections of books, both from converts to the Catholic faith. In 1849 Thomas Scott Preston, an Episcopalian minister, entered the Catholic Church, saying later of his conversion, “At last I was in my Father’s house, and never from that moment have I had one doubt of the truth of the Catholic religion.” [2] After becoming a priest and subsequently serving over the years that followed as a vicar general for the archdiocese of New York, authoring several Catholic apologetic works, at his death in November of 1891 he bequeathed to Archbishop Corrigan a collection of books that the prelate subsequently gave to the seminary library. The archbishop also donated to the seminary over four hundred works given years earlier to his predecessor John Cardinal McCloskey by another remarkable man, E.L. Magoon. In a letter to Cardinal McCloskey dated October 8, 1879, Magoon, who had been a Baptist minister, told the archbishop that in the wake of the deaths of his wife and one remaining child he wished to donate his entire collection of Catholic books and art to him. Anticipating the Cardinal’s surprise, Magoon writes:
“Doubtless this act, so utterly unexpected to yourself, but most deliberate and hearty on my part, will seem no less strange than new...Why should a Protestant preacher… volunteer a precious Catholic donation to the foremost prelate on our continent? It will, perhaps, be best explained, first, by the fact that what is thus imparted, to be used elsewhere, has for twenty years been accumulating the most comprehensive and liberalizing tenderness in the benefactor’s inquiring mind.” [3]
After explaining that he is motivated by the desire to render a return to “the giver of every good and perfect gift” by setting aside “all superfluities” so as to “live a poor, pure, and prostrate life,” he concludes by describing his donation, which included a fourteenth-century illuminated Bible from Belgium:
“Today is sent you, by express a manuscript catalog, the simple record of hundreds of works, topically diversified and in the best condition. May they become of as much profit to others as they have been to him who stands ready tenderly to dismiss the whole
collection over his desolated threshold…”
From four subsequent letters written in 1885, we learn that Magoon’s “inquiring mind” had ultimately led him to embrace the Catholic faith:
“Up here on the third story front, with Canary Dick singing at my elbow, a statuette of the Immaculate above my brow, having flowers every Saturday brought to her feet, an ivory crucifix in front… and religious prints hiding empty alcoves once filled with books now shelved near the couch of our beloved Cardinal, what cheerfully remains is the motto of St. John of the Cross: ‘I am nothing, I have nothing and only ask the way to Jerusalem’”
(Letter of March 25, 1885).
By 1900 the seminary’s library collection had grown to over 33,000 volumes, not counting pamphlets, including a rare book collection with manuscripts as old as the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries and incunabula dating back to 1479. At this time a donor had recently given the library a Hebrew roll manuscript of the Book of Esther and an Ethiopian manuscript prayer book. Much of the growth in the Dunwoodie collection during the early years came from priests donating or bequeathing their own personal libraries to the seminary.
The range of content of the Dunwoodie library not long after its foundation can be gleaned from the findings of a national census of the “Special Collections” of America’s libraries initiated in 1908 and published in 1912, which describes the seminary’s collection in considerable detail:
“Saint Joseph’s Seminary, Dunwoodie, N.Y., contains over 1000 volumes on church history, chiefly that of the Roman Catholic Church… a very rich collection of works on Roman Catholic theology, including both schoolmen and later writers. Special collections are devoted to Catholic apologetics, Christianity, revelation, the primacy of Peter, infallibility, the divinity of Christ, theology of the sacraments, mass, etc., and devotional works on the Blessed Virgin Mary… a collection on patrology comprising over 1200 volumes…[from the donation of E.L. Magoon:] over 400 volumes of Catholic ascetical, homiletical, and apologetical material… over 500 catalogued volumes on canon law, Roman documents, councils, decrees of Popes, and Roman congregations… [and] all the standard Catholic manuals and liturgical texts, including a large number of breviaries, missals, ceremonials, and prayer books.” [4]
By the 1940s the number of books in the seminary library had surged past the 60,000 marks, vastly outgrowing the quarters it had been originally given under the bell tower, and Francis Cardinal Spellman began formulating a plan to erect an entirely new wing for the seminary that would provide a considerably larger home to the library and to the archdiocesan archives. A report concerning this project published in a 1947 issue of The American Archivist described the ambitious plan in detail. Although the proposed design subsequently had to be scaled down somewhat for financial reasons, the new four-floor facility (three stories plus a basement floor), which opened on October 4, 1953, with the title “Corrigan Memorial Library” named in memory of Archbishop Corrigan, constituted a monumental advancement, with a vast increase in shelf space and floor space, built to accommodate up to 125,000 volumes. From the outset, Cardinal Spellman directed that the new library should open its doors not only to Dunwoodie’s seminarians but also to scholars engaged in graduate studies or independent research. At the dedication ceremony, James Francis Cardinal McIntyre of Los Angeles hailed the Corrigan Memorial Library for what it was then and still is, a major depository of the Church’s rich two-thousand-year patrimony:
“…we now have this superb library which will stand out in the world as a source of
knowledge and inspiration and research for centuries to come… New York may well be
proud of such a citadel of learning, knowledge, and resistance to the philosophy of our day which is constantly in flux. This will be a great anchorage of our day. The philosophy of
our time is ever moving, never permanent or fixed, but that philosophy like all false
philosophy will go it's a way – the way of all flesh – but there will remain here this great
monument of stone encompassing vast volumes of tremendous world importance which
will remain until eternity as a tribute to the permanency of knowledge” [5]
At its 1953 opening, the new Corrigan Memorial Library possessed 80,000 volumes with an annual borrowing circulation of 15,000 books. The Major Bowes Rare Book Room, named in honor of the library benefactor Major Edward Bowes, included among its treasures thirty books predating the year 1500. Another room was devoted to a considerable collection of first editions of eminent American and British authors donated by the Countess Mary Young Moore. Her donation also included a number of early printed books, including Bibles from 1492 and 1578, the Reims New Testament of 1582, and a volume of Dante from 1567, plus a leaf from a fifteenth-century Gutenberg Bible. At this time also the library was collaborating with the Library of Congress in the development of a Union Catalog of Theological Source Materials.
The introduction of microfilm technology to the Corrigan collection, envisioned from the outset of plans for the new library in the late 1940s, progressed over the decades that followed, with the library’s microform collection ultimately growing to 11,000 items.
During the late 1990s automation of the library’s card catalog began with cataloging the collection and was completed in 2005 with the creation of an online public access catalog. In March of 2003, the Corrigan Memorial Library was commended by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education and the Association of Theological Schools, which stated that “the library is one of the Seminary’s great assets.”
Recent years have brought the introduction of e-books, e-journals, and other new electronic resources, with the collection of printed, bound volumes growing to over 105,000 (85,000 print monographs and 20,000 bound periodical volumes). In 2016 a new online research platform was introduced on the library’s website, EBSCO EDS.
Even with all the new technology, the printed word will continue to hold pride of place in the ever-continuing development of the Corrigan collection, building upon an already rich patrimony, as E.L. Magoon had anticipated well over a century ago:
“When we and our contemporaries have all gone to the great beyond, benefactors of ampler resources and nobler generosity, let us hope, will supervene and bury our contributions under their cumulative magnificence. Thanks be unto God! Only let our poor hands open trickling fountains on arid heights, or in obscurest depths lay rugged foundations for prospective grandeurs, while yet we may…” (Letter of March 4, 1885).
[1] “The New St. Joseph’s Seminary,” The Seminary, 4, no. 10 (July 1896), 184.[2] “Preston, Thomas Scott,” in The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York, James T. White and Co., 1899), 2: 213.[3] This and all subsequent passages from the letters of E.L. Magoon have been kindly provided by the Archives of the Archdiocese of New York.[4] W.D. Johnston and I.G. Mudge, Special Collections in Libraries in the United States (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1912), 26-31.[5] “Archbishop Corrigan Memorial Library Blessed,” The Catholic News, Oct. 10, 1953, 2.