Did you know Union University has archives?
Yep. On the third floor of the Logos in a corner no one ever sees is a climate-controlled room holding photos, documents, portraits, yearbooks, cassettes and CDs, all documenting the history of Union University, West Tennessee Baptist and even earlier historical times.
This was news to me last week when my photography class took a field trip to the Logos to look at old photographs dating from the late 1800s. After looking at the photos, we all had five minutes to take a quick peek in the actual archive room, and I was in awe.
Where had this been my whole time at Union?
How come I didn’t know about all this history boxed and cataloged on the third floor of the library?
I was captivated by that room, and I left wanting to learn more.
With this in mind, I was excited to talk to Union’s Public Services Librarian and Associate Professor of Library Services Savannah Patterson, as well as the unofficial archivist, about this basically unknown collection of history on campus.
According to Patterson, we don’t know exactly what prompted starting the archives, or even when it actually started, but over the years, photographs and items have naturally been collected and stored.
Before the Logos was built, the archives were stored in stacks on shelves in a room behind the old library. (For those my age, the library used to be where the Writing Center and Wellness Center are now in the PAC. The old archives room used to be where the clinic and Counseling Services are. Funny how things move, right?)
When the archives eventually moved to the newer, climate-controlled room, Union’s archivist at the time, Jenny Manasco, set about organizing and cataloging the hundreds of documents and photos.
Some years after Manasco left, Patterson was hired as an archivist to help search for items for Union’s bicentennial celebration, hosted in the 2022-2023 academic year. She had been a student worker in the archives when she went to Union, and with her experience, she was the best person for the job. Ever since then, she has worked on many projects in that room.
But with the amount of artifacts in the archives, Patterson admits that the job is not the easiest.
“It is a lot to maintain,” Patterson explained. “Because if you’re talking about processing materials, cleaning all that up, then, if you go a step further and go into digitization, that’s additional there.”
It is tempting to ask, is it worth it to spend hours transcribing, sorting and cataloging things that no one seems to care about, or even know about?
Is the work too monotonous for the reward?
Is it, and I cringe to say this, boring?
That, my friend, is a great question.
And the answer to that lies in a weathered, hardback diary written by Bradley Kimbrough.
Bradley Kimbrough was a circuit minister in the mid-1800s who traveled around Middle Tennessee preaching and raising money for a building for Union University to be built in Middle Tennessee. The Union Archives holds his journal.
When Patterson worked in the old archives back in the PAC, she was tasked with transcribing this diary of his travels, and what she discovered knocked my socks off.
Patterson discovered one entry of Kimbrough’s that described him sitting on the porch of the Hermitage with Andrew Jackson.
Guys, Andrew Jackson! Like the President of the United States, Andrew Jackson!
And this journal just happens to be in our library’s archives? You’re kidding.
Patterson casually flipped through the pages of the journal, showing me the beautiful cursive handwriting, date notations at the top of the page and notes Kimbrough left on margins detailing how many miles he had traveled that day.
“There is value in the archives because that is history…” Patterson said. “You’re putting hands on history. Your actual hands, on human history.”
Being in the presence of an artifact dating to the early 1800s was a surreal moment for me. I was afraid to go near it for fear it would somehow disintegrate from my presence.
Seeing a journal that a man carried around and wrote in 200 years ago impacted me more than if I had read a copy in a textbook or an online scan.
“There’s this element that you learn about the character of Union,” Maria Graber, a history major and student worker in the Union archives, said about her hands-on experience in that upstairs room, cataloging and researching when needed.
“[It] helps you understand the character of the university, where it comes from, where they’re trying to go…” Graber later commented. “In a way, going through some of those records and seeing that and understanding the decisions that are made and why they’re made in the past helps you understand, perhaps, why the current administration is doing some of the things that they are doing.”
The archives at Union don’t exist to simply show that Union has been around for longer then 200 years; rather, they preserve Union’s history for a deeper reason.
They teach us about Union’s commitment to Christ, from founding to present.
“We learn from history,” Patterson stated. “It’s important to look back and see how important Union has been in the Christian faith and training students with their Christian education and going into the society fulfilling our mission.”
The archives preservation of history points us back to God’s sovereign plan for Union University, and that makes the archives (in my mind anyway) priceless.
And what better way to spend one’s time and energy than to keep on cataloging, boxing and researching these memories, so that future students and faculty at Union can also marvel at God’s plan?
My time in the archives was not wasted, because my perspective is forever changed.
“If you look back even in the 2008 tornado,” Patterson pointed out, “there’s things you can see through documents, through Dockery’s papers, through photos, through news releases and stuff like that, and just see how God’s provided for this place. And then today, when culture’s changing so much, Union remains rooted in Christ.”
Be the first to comment