About the Donor
Rev. William Eleazar Barton. Image Courtesy of the Oberlin College Archives
William Eleazar Barton (1861-1930) was a prolific author of the early twentieth-century.
Barton is particularly remembered as an author and lecturer on Abraham Lincoln. His publications about Lincoln included The Soul of Abraham Lincoln (1920), The Paternity of Abraham Lincoln (1920), The Life of Abraham Lincoln (1925), The Great and Good Man (1927), The Women Lincoln Loved (1927), and The Lincoln of the Biographers (1930). An avid collector, Barton accumulated a large collection of books, newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, manuscripts, and ephemera related to Lincoln and the Civil War era.
William Eleazer Barton was a Congregational minister, writer, and chronicler of the life of Abraham Lincoln. He was born in the village of Sublette, Illinois, on June 28, 1861. Following undergraduate studies at Berea College, Barton received his divinity degree from Oberlin Theological Seminary in 1890. He had a long career as a minister, serving in nearby Litchfield and Wellington in Ohio, Tennessee, Massachussetts, and finally Oak Park, Illinois, until his retirement in 1924. As a writer and lecturer, Barton also published his sermons and thoughts on religion, culture, morality, and ecclesiastical history. He was an associate of Edgar J.Banks* and traveled to the Holy Land to procure pieces for his collection of scriptural texts**. Barton was a cousin of Clara Barton (1821-1912), founder of the Red Cross, and father to Robert S. Barton (1894-1954), himself also a Lincoln biographer.
In addition to his career as a minister, Barton held a life-long fascination with Abraham Lincoln. Some of Barton’s earliest memories were of seeing the celebration of the Civil War’s end immediately followed by the sadness of Lincoln’s death. Seeing the reactions to the President’s death left an impression, inspiring Barton to look deeper into Lincoln’s life.
Barton spent many years researching his subject, interviewing many who knew and worked with Lincoln personally. and wrote on subjects from Lincoln’s professional and personal life (including Lincoln's parents). Barton delved into Lincoln's relationships with Walt Whitman and Frederick Douglass, as well as the Gettysburg Address. Barton’s final work on Lincoln was published in 1929 just a year before he died.
The Barton Collection donated to Oberlin College include his books on Abraham Lincoln and many of his writings on religious subjects. as an author with over 180 works in our library alone.
Search the online catalog for works by William Barton
Additional items donated to the Divinity School in 1912 include a rare Torah Scroll from North Africa acquired in Palestine c.1902. Initially thought to be from the 19th century, the Torah was later dated by leading Torah scribes to be from the 14th century, making it one of the oldest Torah in the United States and the oldest complete manuscript in the Oberlin College Library. Also of note is a 15th-century Mamluk Qur’an lent to Oberlin in 1913, before being officially donated in 1926. On the Qur’an’s inside cover a handwritten note by Barton indicates it was brought over to the United States as part of a Jerusalem exhibit at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. How exactly it first left Jerusalem, and who was involved in bringing it to the US, is still largely unknown (see the article by Esra Akin-Kivanc in the citation below).
*Yares, Laura. "The Biblical Remnants Under the Bleachers: Religious Extraction, Philanthropic Hobbyists, and the Material Repositories of Religious Studies." Religion and American culture, 2024, Vol.34 (3), p.349-378
**Akin-Kinvanç, Esra. “Such a Koran no individual might own”: The Biography of a Mamluk Qur’an
from Ottoman Jerusalem." Osmanli Araştirmalari: The Journal of Ottoman Studies. 2016, No. 48 (2), p.229-268
Written by Robert Bartels and Ed Vermue. Last updated August 2026.