Mississippi State University President Mark Keenum signed an agreement Friday with the Ulysses S. Grant Association making Mitchell Memorial Library the host of a large collection of documents and memorabilia connected to the 18th president.
University Relations director Maridith Geuder said as MSU researchers divide similar content into sections and as each section is reviewed and processed, each will become open to the public.
“They hope to have everything open to the public by July of 2009,” she said.
John Marszalek, USGA executive director and MSU professor emeritus of history, said along with the letters and manuscripts, there are other things in the collection, such as essential parts of the Grant family Bible, headgear and lithographs.
“We have the page which shows Hyram Ulysses Grant, that’s what he was known as when he was born, that’s written in the Bible with the date he was born,” he said.
However, he said the strength of the collection is not in memorabilia.
“To the average person, if [he] walked in and I showed [him] the collection, [he would] say, ‘This is nothing but paper,’ and it is, but it is the collection of Grant material existing anywhere,” Marszalek said.
Keenum said there are very few universities in America that are repositories for presidential papers.
“A couple that come to mind are the University of Virginia with Thomas Jefferson’s papers, Princeton University with Woodrow Wilson, for example, and for us now to be Mississippi State University, Ulysses S. Grant, that’s very prestigious,” he said. “I think this will help us tremendously in our ability to get that national recognition that I think we deserve.”
Marszalek said the collection was started at Ohio State University in 1962 by the former Grant Association executive director John Simon and moved to Southern Illinois University in 1964.
“We’re talking about 46 years of work of a man’s life, and what [the Ulysses S. Grant Association] did is they went to every known letter and every known repository and made copies of that, then they went to private collectors who had Grant letters, sometimes people donated stuff to them,” he said. “It was just an ongoing process, they literally put out a dragnet over 40 years and just brought in all this material.”
He said the collection is organized for the purpose of publishing 30 volumes of Grant papers ,and MSU will continue the publications that have already started being published.
“We’re also going to organize the papers so visiting scholars and students here on campus can use those papers for their own research,” Marszalek said. “It’s not that they weren’t organized at SIU, but it was organized in a way for a certain specific purpose, and now I think we’re broadening that purpose.”
Keenum said it is fitting for the papers to be in Mississippi.
“You think about Ulysses S. Grant and his career, and you realize very quickly that the state of Mississippi had a great deal to do with propelling Ulysses S. Grant’s career militarily and then politically,” he said. “It will be very beneficial for scholars and historians who are studying that time in American history and Mississippi history to come here to Mississippi State University to have an opportunity to review these very special treasure that we are now in possession of.”
He said MSU’s first president Stephen Lee, was a Confederate general who fought against Grant at Vicksburg.
“He was also instrumental in working with his former combatants in helping to develop and build the Vicksburg National Military Park, and it was through his leadership working with his former enemies that he put that behind him as a leader of our institution and moved on,” Keenum said. “Our state has done the same thing. Our nation has done that as well.”
Marszalek said the collection coming to the university indicates Mississippi is no longer the stereotype some people think it is.
“I think we’re very much involved in intellectual life here at Mississippi State University, so it’s great for the university also,” he said. “I think, really, the kind of publicity we’ve gotten – newspapers all over the country, we’re on CNN – indicates that I think people are realizing that we have a major university here.”