The Library had almost completed its first century when the fire struck. In that time, it had amassed a hugely significant and unique collection, and had developed a variety of library services to support its use. In 1899, the Library published an Annotated list of the principal manuscripts in the New York State Library as part of its State Library Bulletin. The list describes significant manuscript holdings in the order in which the Library received them, beginning in 1846 with Proceedings Albany committee of correspondence, 1775-78. The list includes some items the library cares for to this day.
The list goes on to detail important manuscript collections, including:
In 1883, the library building needed to be razed to facilitate completion of the new capitol. The library collection was moved into rooms and corridors in the portion of the building that was ready for occupancy. Formal space for the library, on the third and fourth floors of the new capitol building, was completed and occupied by the mid-1890s. Its central reference room was a multi-storied, cavernous, high-ceilinged room that was typical of many of the rooms in the capitol. Pictured above, from the New York State Library in the Capitol, Albany (NYS Library call number PRI3839+) is a view of the central reference room, Room 35, with its high ceiling. The height of the room allowed for three tiers of stacks lined with bookcases and with small tables and chairs for reading or working. Several portraits in frames of various sizes are positioned around the room, including one of DeWitt Clinton to the center-right. Below, a view of the painted ceiling taken from the first floor of the central reference room shows the detail of the windows and several arches that define the third tier of the room. The motif of the central painting is several cherubs hovering around a book.
In 1901, the Library received the Duncan Campbell Memorial Collection, named for the Albany lawyer who was appointed Assistant Adjudant General in 1857. Campbell served until 1862 under Governors King and Morgan. Around 1870, he began to assemble a large collection of books that comprised 300 early printed and rare books, including early editions and translations of classical authors, collections of early English statutes, and 47 incunabula. In total, the Campbell collection included over 2,000 printed works, 19 bound manuscript volumes, 24 separate manuscripts, and several hundred pamphlets and early engravings. Some manuscripts were dated as early as 1,000 A.D.
As part of the provisions of the donation, the Campbell collection was be kept separate from the rest of the collection in its own alcove or cases. Additionally, a printed catalogue was created: Catalogue of the Duncan Campbell Collection.
Per Joseph Gavit's recollections after the fire, the Campbell Collection was located in Room 31, the Senate Finance Committee Room. Gavit wrote:
I have been told that certain people stood in the Senate Finance Committee room, while the fire was sweeping towards it, but that they did nothing from ignorance of what to do. Had they been able to recognize the valuable books of the Duncan Campbell collection, those might all have been saved.
The Journals of the meetings of the Board of Regents of the University of the State of New York for 1909 describe the work of State Archivist A.J.F. Van Laer to translate and arrange the Library's collection of early Dutch records. "These volumes" the report says, "contain 10,121 written folio pages. Mr. Van Laer, who has been State Archivist 11 years, it is needless to say is a man of fine dignity and probity of character, a Dutchman, highly educated in his native tongue, and a thoroughly capable English scholar."
In the pre-1911 accounts of the Library's collections and operations, it's difficult to shake the impending sense of threat or disaster that suggests itself in each conversation. Van Laer's efforts to translate and arrange Dutch records were certainly subject to competing concerns over access and preservation:
No doubt we will all agree that such absolutely priceless documents as these in the original should not only be guarded with the utmost care, but should be made easily available to all who may have interest in them. They can not be guarded with care if they are to be subject to
examination by the curious, or even by ordinary students; nor can they be made available to the many who have a genuine interest in them without being translated ·with absolute reliability and without being printed in form for rather wide distribution.The archivist advises that they be prepared and published so that the original Dutch text and the English translation shall appear side by side in the publication, and while a less expensive method might be employed if there were imperative need for it, it seems as though this method of procedure is the only one which will completely meet the case.
It is estimated that this work would be likely to require practically the entire time of a capable man for 15 years.
In the publication Annual report / New York State Library - 1911 following the fire, some adjustment is made to Van Laer's projected schedule:
The time of the archivist for some month after the fire was necessarily taken up with the work of manuscript restoration, and to this extent the active work of translation of Dutch records has been in abeyance. Even after it was possible to resume this work, it was found to be seriously hampered by the lack of a proper bibliographical and historical' reference equipment, such as formerly existed in the State Library. As soon as appropriations were avail able, however, the Library took steps to acquire the books of first importance for this work and the translation is now proceeding as fast as possible under the conditions.
Joseph Gavit's accounts of the Capitol Fire provide detailed information about Library conditions in the years preceding 1911. He describes the process, beginning around 1900, of supplementing the Library's overcrowded iron shelving with smaller, inexpensive pine bookcases which "like building blocks can be stacked wherever there is space enough for them to stand." Pine shelving was added to the Library anywhere that space permitted. As Gavit described it:
It stopped up corridor windows, filled gaps between doorways, was built up along the railing side of galleries. What we had ordered by the hundred in 1901 we ordered by the half dozen in 1910, because it required constant study to figure out places for them. There had even been a special framework made so that a stairwell could be utilized by placing the cases on top of the railing around it in room 34. It was to be found in broad aisles in the north stack, leaving just space enough between faces for the Pages to get through. It was cut and planned and fitted into corners, under slanting roofs, under iron stairways. Everywhere there was pine shelving--except in the public reading rooms.
(Joseph Gavit's Manuscript accounts of the New York State Capitol fire, 1911)
The room Gavit discussed in this passage, Room 34, housed the State medical library. In the photograph, three women and two men sit on wooden chairs at wooden desks. In the background are stairs leading to the second and third levels of the room.
Anxiety around the safety of Library collections was ever-present in the years leading up to the fire, with multiple representatives expressing their concerns.
In June of 1909, Commissioner Draper identified the "many dangers from fire, handling, or even theft" that threatened the Library's "invaluable collection" of about 260,000 historical documents. Just a few months before, Dr. Harlan Hoyt Horner wrote to the superintendent of public buildings in his capacity as the Education Department's chief of the administration division. He wrote:
I beg to advise you that the section included in the north end of the State Library between the third and fifth floors, is without any available means of extinguishing fire. This section includes much pine and oak shelving filled with books and pamphlets. Here is also located the Library bindery with much inflammable material used in this work. Short-circuiting of electrical wires or many other causes could easily start a fire which would quickly pass from one stack to another and from floor to floor before the city fire department could get water to that height in the building. Hand extinguishers would be of little use in fighting such a fire when well started.
As Commissioner Draper and the rest of the Education Department waited on the long-delayed completion of their own building on Washington Avenue, the need to restate the threat was clear. On March 6, 1911, mere weeks before the fire, Draper wrote to the Trustees of Public Buildings:
It must be said that there is a constant menace to the invaluable historical manuscripts and other collections in the State Library through the lack of suitable provision for their care...
Joseph Gavit was a longtime employee of the Library who would later serve as director from 1938-1940. In 1911, Gavit served as the shelf curator, and his incredible knowledge of the sprawling library shelves and their contents were essential in the salvage and rebuilding efforts that began immediately after the fire. In his manuscript account of the fire, Gavit adds some detail to the dangerous conditions in the Library in the years leading up the the fire. He describes the fire as having "in a few short hours, destroyed the work of all the many hands and brains that had loved the library during the almost completed century of its existence." He provides a shocking description of the facility at the time of the fire:
Such a story will not be complete unless it describes the conditions existing in the library at the time of the fire.--the crowding so that every last comer was utilized for book storage; the futile storage of precious things remote from public reach, and so beyond saving when the fire came; the very structural defects of the building itself, that while they enhanced its beauty, made its contents only an easier prey to devouring flames.
A close-up view of the third tier of the central reference room shows bookcases lining the walls, with tables and chairs topped with books and papers.