Allegheny College
Special Collections of Pelletier Library

Observations by Edwin Wolf
Section IV.

Even more miscellaneous were the gifts received from individuals during the early days of the college. Many of Alden's friends in New England, New York and Pennsylvania sent a volume or a dozen volumes to the struggling institution of learning. Publishers, anxious for the text book business, added pourboires in the form of a book or so. The Congress of the United States for some years recognized Alleghany College as a deposit library and sent it series of government documents. Authors, friends of Alden, such as Hannah Adams, Thaddeus M. Harris, David Hosack, Eleazer Williams and others, sent copies of their own works. And, to be sure, fellow-ministers sent copies of their sermons.

Since there is nothing distinctive about the so-called "Ex Dono" collection, being of so miscellaneous and almost haphazard a nature, discussion of individual items will be postponed to later sections of this report. According to a modern count there were 1,255 such volumes listed in the Library Catalogue of 1823, of which 187 are now not to be found.

As a whole the early library of Alleghany College was what Timothy Alden claimed it to be when he appealed to the Germans of Pennsylvania in 1823 for funds to establish a Professorship in German literature: "The Library, a most useful and indispensable appendage to any such institution, through the munificence of Winthrop, Bentley, Thomas, and many other benefactors, comprising books in thirty different languages, is the first, except one, aa to the excellence of the selection and point of value, belonging to any collegiate institution in the United States.