Homewood Campus Tour

Ground was broken for the MSE Library on June 13, 1962. The culmination of a project that had begun in 1956, the new building was designed to consolidate the library materials scattered in departmental libraries all over campus, with room (it was hoped) for expansion into the next century. Because such a large building was required to accomodate all the collections, the architects, Wrenn, Lewis, and Jencks (working in association with Meyer and Ayers) located four and a half of the library's six floors below ground level so as not to dwarf the older, smaller buildings on campus.

Beginning on August 17, 1964, the one million books which were then held in the Gilman stacks and elsewhere were moved onto the new structure's 30 miles of shelves (a process which took five months to complete), and the building was formally dedicated on November 7, 1964. (The first major renovation of the library was completed in 1997.)

In April 1965, the University trustees unanimously voted to name the library in honor of Milton Stover Eisenhower, president (pictured at right) of the University from 1956-67 and again from April 1971 to February 1972. The Eisenhower Library building also contains the Center for the Study of Recent American History, which is editing and publishing the papers of U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

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