Mennonite Historical Library
| Established | 1906 |
|---|---|
| Location | Goshen College, Indiana, United States |
| Branches | 1 |
| Collection | |
| Size | 67,000 |
| Other information | |
| Director | John D. Roth |
| Staff | 3 |
| Website | http://www.goshen.edu/mhl |
The Mennonite Historical Library (MHL) is considered the world's most prominent and complete collection of resources and artifacts pertaining to Mennonites and related Anabaptist groups. It is housed in the Harold and Wilma Good Library on the campus of Goshen College in Goshen, Indiana. The specialty library was founded in 1906 under the guidance of Harold S. Bender and Ernst Correll. Historian John D. Roth is the current director.
On June 13, 1906, the Goshen College Alumni Association unanimously passed a resolution to establish a Mennonite Historical Library on campus. Already at that date, alumni were committed to fostering the Anabaptist-Mennonite heritage that still informs the purpose of Goshen College and is part of its distinctive character. The suggestion may have originated with C. Henry Smith, then professor of history at the college. Smith, together with the Alumni Association executive committee, served on the book selection committee for the proposed library. By the following June, out of its endowment earnings of $82.50, the Association had expended $33.88 to nurture the growth of the infant collection.
Six years later, not long before Smith departed for what is now Bluffton University, the Alumni Association formally presented the collection, then numbering about 80 volumes, to Goshen College. Among the early volumes were a 1771 edition of the Dordrecht Confession of Faith in French translation; an inventory of the Mennonite Archives in Amsterdam; C.H. Wedel's German-language general history of the Mennonites (the first written and published in America); and Helen Reimensnyder Martin's book Tillie, a Mennonite Maid. The collection grew only modestly during the following decade, a period of turmoil for the college. One of the earliest North American institutional collections of Anabaptist Mennonite materials, the archive has grown over the past century to truly earn the description, prematurely granted by early Goshen catalogs, as "one of the most valuable of its kind in America."
After a one-year closure, Goshen College reopened in the fall of 1924 with a new vision for making the institution a center for the academic study of its denominational heritage in order to educate leaders for the future of the Mennonite Church. Young professors Harold S. Bender, Ernst Correll and Guy Hershberger were among those active in promoting the concurrent resurrection of the college's Mennonite Historical Society. Students, faculty and several alumni and friends were part of the reconstitution group's charter membership of 42 in 1924. Activities of the society and its leaders were key in transforming the MHL's several shelves of topically related material into a comprehensive resource for the study of Anabaptist-Mennonite history, life, and thought.
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