1. 250 Years of Learning

250 Years of Learning Washington and Lee University's libraries celebrate a quarter millennium of scholarship.

By Kelsey Goodwin
March 25, 2026

As Washington and Lee's university library system celebrates 250 years since the first donation of books to the campus, an exhibit called "A Witness to Learning: The Library Since 1776," on display through May 2026 in the Northen Lobby (located on level one of Leyburn Library), invites visitors to stroll through the timeline of the university library's expansion and evolution. Below are some highlights from the library's archives that shed light on how the library system has grown and changed, both in terms of physical space and programming, since its inception.

1776: The First Books

Long before the library became the intellectual heart of Washington and Lee University's campus, the seeds of a great library were planted in Revolutionary-era Virginia. In 1776 - the same year the colonies declared independence - the institution then known as Liberty Hall Academy acquired its first books. It was a modest beginning: a small collection of volumes intended to support the education of young men in the Shenandoah Valley, sustained by the Presbyterian conviction that an educated mind was both a civic duty and a spiritual one.

Those earliest holdings have not been forgotten. Several surviving volumes from the Liberty Hall Academy Library remain in the care of W&L's Special Collections and Archives today, tangible links to the institution's founding ideals. The Johnston family papers and the recently rediscovered Madison manuscript are among the materials that connect the library's present to the founding generation of the American republic.

1882-1905: The First and First Librarian

For most of the 19th century, the library's collection grew steadily but without a permanent, purpose-built home. That changed in 1882 when Mrs. Josephine Louis Newcomb donated $20,000 to Washington and Lee to construct the first library in honor of her husband Warren Newcomb. The library included unheated stacks space, a reading room, and an office for the first college librarian, Anne Robertson White. "Miss Annie Jo" quickly professionalized the library by expanding study hours, purchasing books for student and faculty use, and introducing the first subject-based cataloging system.

1979: The Carnegie/McCormick Era

The library's collections, staff, and services quickly outgrew Newcomb Library. In 1905, industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie donated $50,000 to Washington and Lee for the construction and maintenance of a greatly expanded library. The Carnegie Library (now Huntley Hall) opened in September 1908 with 40,000 volumes already on its shelves and capacity for five times that number - an ambitious vision for a small liberal arts college in Lexington, Virginia.

The Carnegie Library was crowned by a distinctive copper dome that became one of the campus's architectural landmarks. Inside, plaster bas-relief sculptures adorned the walls of its large central reading room. For more than three decades, it served as the campus's intellectual center. Then, in 1940, funding from the McCormick family - heirs of Cyrus H. McCormick, the Rockbridge County native who invented the mechanical reaper and was a generous friend of the university - enabled a major renovation. The copper dome was removed to make room for additional stacks, and the building was renamed McCormick Library in the family's honor. As a 1940 article in the W&L Alumni Magazine noted the renovated space was not merely an expansion but effectively a new library built around the old one's core.

1979: Moving into Leyburn

By the mid-1970s, it was clear that even the expanded McCormick Library could no longer keep pace with the university's growing collections and community. In 1975, plans were drawn up for a new, larger facility. On Jan. 10, 1979, those plans became reality in one of the most memorable days in W&L library history: Faculty, staff, students and members of the Lexington community formed a human chain across campus, loading books from McCormick Library into shopping bags supplied by the Leggett department store and carrying them, hand to hand, to their new home.

The new building was named for James Graham Leyburn, a W&L sociologist and dean who championed the liberal arts throughout his career. What began as a functional upgrade has, over the decades since, grown into something much more: a 21st-century learning hub that would be unrecognizable to those first Liberty Hall students.

1900: Washington and Lee's Law Library

Washington and Lee's law library has its own distinct history, separate from - and sometimes in tension with - the university's main library. The law school (then called the Lexington Law School) was founded in 1849 by Judge John White Brockenborough, and when it merged with the university after the Civil War, law students were initially barred from using the main campus library. The first building constructed to house the law school and its library - Tucker Memorial Hall, completed in 1900 - was named for John Randolph Tucker, the first dean of W&L School of Law. It was also partly funded by Philadelphia benefactor Vincent Bradford.

Tucker Hall burned down in December 1934, and its entire collection was lost apart from a handful of books. Alumni donated new books, and Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell was dispatched to a Richmond bookstore to help replace the federal law collection. A new building was open by 1936. The law library moved to its current home when Lewis Hall - funded by a $9 million gift from Sydney Lewis '40, '43L, P'66 - opened in the early 1970s. The Powell Archives, established in the late 1990s when Justice Powell donated his papers to the school, now fills in much of what the fire destroyed of the law library's early institutional memory.

1996: The Telford Science Library

Washington and Lee's library system expanded to a third physical location in 1996, when the Robert Lee Telford Science Library opened as part of a $33 million renovation of the university's science facilities. The library is in the Science Addition, adjacent to Leyburn Library, and houses the university's science collection alongside reference materials, periodicals and digital research resources. The library was named in honor of Robert Lee Telford Jr. 1922, a native of Lewisburg, West Virginia, who built a career as an engineer and president of a large engineering firm and directed a significant gift toward supporting science education at W&L. His name also endures through an endowed gift fund held by the university library.

The library has created a webpage for its 250th anniversary celebration; stay updated on upcoming events, speakers and a soon-to-be announced exhibit imagining the library's next 250 years.