Education: Monument on Deck 38

Professor William Sumner Jenkins of the University of North Carolina was fed up with the historian’s lot. He had research work to do on constitutional amendments and he was well started, but to finish it he would have to travel thousands of miles to study documents scattered all over the nation. He reflected unhappily that he did not even know where many of them were, or how long he would have to search for them, or whether they existed at all. Then one day in 1936 Jenkins got his idea. He knew that in official archives and private collections throughout the 48 states there were hundreds of precious veins of historical material that had never been properly tapped. Why couldn’t the documents be dug out, microfilmed, and gathered in one central place?

The idea of assembling U.S. historical documents had been something historians had talked about for more than a century. In 1941, with one assistant, stubby little Professor Jenkins set out to make it an actuality.

Georgia in Manhattan. With the backing of the university and $100,000 from the Library of Congress, he and his photographer traveled more than 55,000 miles, took 120,000 feet of film (the equivalent of about 2,000,000 pages). They lugged their cameras through legislative archives, university libraries, historical societies, rare bookshops, attics, basements, law courts and Indian reservations. They unearthed and photographed early court calendars, state lunatic asylum records, governors’ letters, city treasurers’ reports, letters of U.S. Indian agents and manuscripts of colonial legislation (among them: the famed Massachusetts Body of Liberties of 1641 and the only perfect copy of An Abstract or Abridgment of the Laws Made and Past by William Penn of 1701).

Many of the documents, Jenkins found, had themselves traveled far. The only known copy of the Georgia legislative journal of 1799 was photographed in the Manhattan apartment of a private collector. A Louisiana senate journal turned up in the New York State Library at Albany. The Massachusetts State Library turned out to be a storehouse of legal records from Mississippi and Tennessee.

Blood Bank. Last week, on Study Deck 38 of the Library of Congress, surrounded by reels of film stacked high like giant coins, William Jenkins was sorting, indexing, and cataloguing his Monumenta Americana. When a 600-page inventory is published three months from now, historians will be able to locate material that few would ever have been able to see before, and scholars, schools and libraries can then order the documents themselves on microfilm.

Jenkins likes to think of the Monumenta as the first great “encyclopedia of the nation’s sources … a virtual blood bank of the vital life blood of research … It is delivered,” says he proudly, “for the everlasting service of men.”