Special Collections & Exhibits

Eudora Welty, Mississippi’s most critically acclaimed living author, lived about 3 blocks from Millsaps College. She was born on April 13, 1909, and died July 23, 2001. She served as Writer in Residence at the college in 1964-65 and was an emerita member of its Board of Trustees. An active community participant, Welty often attended campus functions and maintained a presence with the college, as she did with the city of Jackson at large. This page will endeavor to represent Eudora Welty and her work from the Jackson and Millsaps College perspective. A portrait, painted by Jackson artist Karl Wolfe in 1982, was commissioned by a group of Welty’s friends and is on display in the Millsaps-Wilson Library.

Since 1983, Millsaps has hosted several visiting scholars as the Eudora Welty Professor of Southern Studies. Dr. Michael Pickard serves as the Eudora Welty Scholar for Southern Literature, a permanent tenured faculty position at Millsaps.

In 1984, the Southern Literary Festival was held on the Millsaps campus as a celebration of Welty’s 75th birthday. In addition to the other festivities of the regional conference, the Millsaps library created the Eudora Welty Collection.

In 1996, a weeklong conference, a special tribute to Eudora Welty, was held in Jackson, concurrently with a Writers’ Conference of the Mississippi Writers Association. The eclectic program included such diverse happenings as presentations by many authors, a Songwriters’ Tribute, ceremonies at Davis School where Welty attended, readings and gala affairs. Funding was provided in part by the Mississippi Arts Commission.

A speaker at this conference was Dr. Suzanne Marrs, noted Welty scholar, friend and former Welty Scholar-in-Residence at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Marrs, who reorganized the Welty Collection and wrote a finding aid (The Welty Collection, University Press of Mississippi, 1988), retired in 2015 as the Eudora Welty Scholar-in-Residence at Millsaps College.

In the spring of 1997, the Eudora Welty Society and Millsaps College co-sponsored a scholarly conference entitled “Eudora Welty, Mississippi Home Ties” which was directed by Marrs and which drew participants from across the country and from Denmark and France as well.

On October 8, 1998, the 92nd Street Y presented “A Tribute to Eudora Welty,” and a very fitting tribute it was. Prompted by the publication of the two-volume Library of America collection of Welty’s works, the Y invited Michael Kreyling, Ann Beattie, Richard Ford, Randall Kenan, William Maxwell, Joyce Carol Oates, and Elizabeth Spencer to speak. Maxwell unfortunately was at the last minute too ill to appear, but poet Karl Kirchwey, Director of the Unterberg Poetry Center, ably spoke in Maxwell’s stead.

The Millsaps-Wilson Library has a standing exhibition of 18 black-and-white photographs taken by Jackson author, Eudora Welty. These 18 photographs are placed on the walls of the hall leading to the alcove as well as the walls of the alcove. The majority of these photographs were taken during the 1930s and the 1940s when Welty traveled the state of Mississippi capturing folk life subjects with her camera.

This collection of photographs was given to the Millsaps-Wilson Library by Ruth Redig Watson, class of 1948 and a Trustee of the college.

A gift from the family of the late King R. Johnson, Jr. of Madison, has greatly enhanced the history holdings of the Millsaps-Wilson Library. Comprised of nearly 4000 volumes, Johnson’s collection is focused on warfare from ancient to modern times. The works include scholarly and popular explorations of many aspects of warfare including not only strategy and logistics, but social, cultural, and political implications as well. In addition to the volumes of military history, the collection includes maps, works on general history and a number of books on the Titanic.

The Lehman Engel Collection is named for its donor, A. Lehman Engel (1910-1982) a Jackson-born musician, composer, conductor, author and teacher. The collection consists of his personal library which he transferred to Millsaps over a period of 20 years, the balance being willed to the library upon his death in 1982. Numbering approximately 3,000 volumes, the collection is strong in the arts, particularly music and literature, but it is quite eclectic with an interesting variety that reflects its collector. Engel, who was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree by Millsaps in 1971, also donated his collection of LP recordings which is equally strong on the musical theatre. A classmate and friend of renowned author Eudora Welty, Engel graduated from Central High School in Jackson and is buried in Beth Israel cemetery near the Millsaps campus. The library owns copies of correspondence between Engel and Welty.

The books in this collection were willed to the Millsaps library by Paul Ramsey, a Millsaps graduate and noted scholar and author, who died in 1988. Ramsey wrote and taught ethics, specifically, applied ethics and the approximately 2500 books in the collection feature medical and other issues with marked social impact. He was born in Mendenhall, Mississippi in 1913 and earned his B.A. from Millsaps in 1935. He served on the Millsaps faculty from 1937 to 1939, teaching history and social science. He earned his Ph.D. from Yale University Divinity School and he was on the faculty at Princeton University at the time of his death.

This collection, consisting of approximately 1,500 volumes pertaining to Christian ethics, was a gift of Dr. Harmon L. Smith, Emeritus Professor of Moral Theology of the Divinity School, Duke University. Dr. Smith, a 1952 graduate of Millsaps College, donated the collection in 1999 upon his retirement from Duke University. At the same time he established the Harmon L. Smith Lecture Series. The collection contains many books on medical as well as general ethics issues.

The Millsaps library owns a collection of 12 photographs by Roland Freeman, published by Diogenese, Inc. and The University of Mississippi Center for the Study of Southern Culture. Freeman held the Millsaps College Eudora Welty Visiting Scholar Chair in the spring of 1997, when a combined exhibit of his and Welty’s photographs was held on campus. These photos, which were a gift of the photographer, are displayed in the library’s information commons:

1. Peter, East Baltimore, Maryland, June 1969
2. Community of Elders, Mississippi, July 1975
3. Cigar Box Fiddler Scott Dunbar, Mississippi, July 1975
4. Gandy Dancers (railroad workers), Mississippi, August 1976
5. Sunday Baseball Game, near Buffalo, Mississippi, September 1976
6. Shopping on Gay Street, East Baltimore, Maryland, 1973
7. In the Sand Hills, Near Bennettsville, South Carolina, 1979
8. Hallway of Polk Home, Americus, Georgia, April 1971
9. Getting Acquainted, Sunday Afternoon in Druid Hill Park, Baltimore,Maryland, August 1973
10. Howard University Student, Washington, D.C., June 1979
11. Before Sunday Evening Service, St. Helena Island, South Carolina, June,1980
12. Mrs. Viola Allen, Africatown, Alabama, November 1985.

The Millsaps library maintains a small collection of books which are curious, special or rare. Numbering about 2,500, these books have normally been donations to the library or were discovered to be among older titles in the collection. Some interesting examples of titles in the collection are: A Christopher Barker edition of The Bible, published in 1583; Sir Walter Raleigh’s “The Historie of the World in Five Books,” published in 1666; and “A History of Negro Baptists in Mississippi,” by Patrick Thompson, published in 1895.