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.
History
Early years
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."
Mennonite Historical Society
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.
Over the next five years, the society launched both its scholarly journal, The Mennonite Quarterly Review, and its monograph series, Studies in Anabaptist and Mennonite History. For the next quarter century, the society was the primary funding source for the growth of the MHL.
Building the collection
Throughout its history, the MHL has relied on a combination of donation and purchase to build its holdings. In June 1906, Goshen College received as a gift a 1534 Bible in the Zurich (Froschauer) translation long favored by the Swiss and South German Anabaptists over the more widespread Luther translation. One of the library's most prized pieces, the only known copy of the 1564 (first extant) edition of the Ausbund, an Anabaptist hymnal still used by the Amish, was purchased for $10 in 1928 in a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, bookshop.
From early on, the MHL holdings incorporated significant portions of earlier North American collections such as those assembled by Mennonite publisher and bishop John F. Funk and historian John Horsch, who collected books for his work with the Mennonite Publishing House and Mennonite Historical Committee.