Michael H. Harris

Books on the Frontier: The Extent and Nature of Book Ownership in Southern Indiana, 1800-1850

The quality of the cultural life of the American frontier has long been in dispute. Some historians argue that the frontier forced the pioneers to revert to a near barbaric stage while it divested them of all aspects of their former cultures. Others maintain with equal vigor that the society which developed on each frontier was very nearly a carbon copy of the settled areas further east, and that the culture of Americans had not been significantly altered by the frontier process. Most agree, however, that evidence testifying to the nature and extent of book ownership provides one means of measuring the progress of culture on the frontier. This paper summarizes the results of an intensive study of this topic on the southern Indiana frontier. Data were collected from a variety of sources, but especially important were county probate records, which often contained inventories indicating books owned by early Indiana residents. An examination of over 2,000 inventories located in sixteen southern Indiana counties produced descriptions of more than 500 private libraries. An analysis of these libraries shows that the pattern of book ownership was not startingly different from that revealed by similar studies of book ownership in the American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Clearly, books were not impossible to acquire in early Indiana, and a sizable proportion of the estates inventoried in the counties studied contained books. Most of the collections were small and narrowly religious in nature, with larger libraries still tending toward the utilitarian. However, a small number of inventories were discovered which listed large numbers of books; a few men--those with both the means and the inclination--built large and well-balanced libraries on the Indiana frontier.

The Library Book: Centennial History of the Minneapolis Public Library. Bruce Weir Benidt

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