About the Collection
Clarence Ward as a young man
When Clarence Ward, Oberlin’s first director of the Allen Memorial Art Museum and first
art professor with a doctorate, arrived in 1916 one of his priorities was to found an art library in what is now the museum’s East Gallery. Inspired by his friend I.T. Frary—the architectural critic, historian, photographer and author of Thomas Jefferson, architect and builder (Richmond, 1931)—Ward looked to Thomas Jefferson’s library as a model. Although he had more contemporary resources available, the painstaking process of reconstructing Jefferson’s library was a means of pulling together an authoritative basis
for modern artistic and technical knowledge about architecture, landscape, decorative and mechanical arts, and fine arts.
When he retired from the college in 1949, the library, now in the second-floor gallery, had grown to nearly 25,000 books, prints and photographs; the Jefferson Architecture Collection had grown to 46 volumes and was housed in a seminar room dedicated to the study of American architecture.
The Jefferson Room ca. 1943
The Oberlin College Library continues to expand the Jefferson Architecture Collection; today it includes all but a handful of the 62 books in Fiske Kimball’s bibliography "Thomas Jefferson, Architect" published in 1916 when Clarence Ward began building the Jefferson collection that same year, and it has been relied upon by subsequent art librarians for the past 100 years. Today, Oberlin’s replica collection is certainly the finest such collection outside of the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University.
John Harwood, PhD, University of Toronto. Last revised August 2026.