Letter writing is something that I find truly fascinating. Honestly, I should probably say letter reading is something I find truly fascinating because I often don’t find much fascination in actually writing them. Letter reading then. In letters people give details about current events, tiny details about people related to them, opinions, ideas, and every other kind of thing. Reading books about historic times or events is one thing, but reading the actual words a person wrote while living through periods of time gone by is quite another. Our Archives department here in McConnell Library recently acquired two collections of personal letters, one collection was written by John Preston McConnell to his son Carl, the other is a collection of letters written by Carl McConnell to his father John Preston McConnell. It was discovered by careful ordering and reading that many of these letters went together- as in one letter was in answer to another. By interfiling these we actually see a conversation between J.P. McConnell and his son. As far as I know, this is the first time we have had a glimpse of the family dynamic of the McConnell family in such a real way. What makes this even more fascinating is that these letters were written during the Great Depression and we get to see some of the thoughts of a college president during those troubled times.
In these letters, J. P. McConnell gives fatherly advice, relates things that bother him (these were the Great Depression years and in several letters he mentions being told to cut employee pay by 30%!), he tells Carl about various acquisitions the State Teachers College (which would later be known as Radford University) had made, talks a bit about the library that I happen to be sitting in at this moment was being built, talks about student enrollment, and talks very very often about his relatives in real and personal ways. Seeing this side of our university founder is something I don’t believe we have had the opportunity to do before.
Because we think this collection will be of interest and value to researchers, we are presenting a digital collection of some of this correspondence:
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