In the midst of the Great Depression, the federal Public Works Administration or PWA – part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s alphabet soup of New Deal agencies – funded construction of Southeast’s new library. Completed in 1939 between Albert and Leming halls, directly across from Academic Hall, the original building – eventually named for the college’s beloved librarian Miss Sadie Kent – was a neoclassical, limestone masterpiece in harmony with early campus architectural styles.
Hello, I’m Dr. Joel Rhodes, and to celebrate the university’s birthday, let’s talk about Kent Library.
Kent’s north facing windows featured forty-five stained glass windows commissioned from artist Owen Bonawit – whose work can also be found on the campus of Yale and Duke. The frieze on the northern façade, is engraved with the names of nine writers and thinkers, determined by English professor Harold Grauel and by President Parker to be the most influential to western civilization: Homer, Thomas Carlyle, William Shakespere, Henry David Thoreau, John Milton, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Virgil. Keen observers took issue with unusual, yet correct, spelling of S-h-a-k-e-s-p-e-r-e
Between 1965 and 1968, Kent experienced a multi-million-dollar renovation that increased interior space five-fold but more prominently wrapped the original structure in a modernist concrete screen with protruding white portico. The stained glass was taken down and redistributed throughout the library. The portico now features 17 intellectuals: Whitman, Twain, Shakespeare (this time spelled… Shakespeare), Milton, Emerson, Cardinal John Henry Newman, Virgil, Geoffrey Chaucer, Carlyle, John Ruskin, Leo Tolstoi, Thoreau, Edgar Allen Poe, Eugene Field, Victor Hugo, Homer, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
