For over three decades, Sadie Kent reigned as matriarch of Southeast’s library. As many students and faculty suspected, it was actually Miss Kent’s library, not the university’s. “Some remember her as an overbearing Army general,” professor Harold Grauel observed, “who acted as if every book and every piece of furniture in the library were like rare jewels to be guarded with her life.”
Kent came to Southeast in 1905 to teach hygiene and geography before taking over as head librarian in 1910, the position she held until retiring in 1943.
For most of that tenure, the library was located on Academic Hall’s main floor; twenty thousand books behind large iron gates. And each night Miss Kent locked those gates to her kingdom. While pioneering an “open stack” system that allowed students unprecedented access for browsing and studying, Kent otherwise ran the library “old school.” “When she was in her library, she was the king and the queen, and the whole thing,” remembered a student. Strict and stern, Kent demanded respect, decorum, and above all quiet.
The library eventually outgrew Academic Hall and Southeast built a new facility using Public Works Administration funds and based primarily on Kent’s architectural designs. Completed in 1939, the library remained unnamed because the New Deal prohibited naming buildings for living persons. In 1943 after the PWA became inactive, Southeast officially named our library after the only real choice: Sadie Kent.
