Long-time librarian reflects on his job, USC's past
The South Caroliniana Library has seen a fair bit in its years, and for the last 30 or so, Henry Fulmer has been there with it.
Fulmer said he first stepped foot in the Horseshoe building as a graduate student in 1979 or 1980 — he’s not sure which, though a curriculum vitae suggests it was 1981. After years of passing it by as an undergraduate student; today, he’s the curator of its manuscripts division.
“I actually came here working as a graduate student assistant, but that turned into one job after another after another,” Fulmer said. “I walked in, and I’ve never walked out.”
Speaking in a hushed tone, he stood in the library’s reading room Thursday afternoon under a tall cream ceiling with brick red trim and recalled when Pope John Paul II visited the Horseshoe in 1987 and when the Secret Service secured the building and covered its tall windows in 1983 for the arrival of President Ronald Reagan.
But his anecdotes represent a sliver of the history to which the library has born witness since it was built in 1840, much of which correlates with the university’s own.
At its construction, the South Caroliniana was the only library at the school, then South Carolina College, and housed all of the college’s collections. Today, it’s the oldest freestanding college library still in use in the country, and it represents a niche within the university’s library system.
The building has seen marked change, though, even since Fulmer arrived.
“I remember the years when protocol for people doing research was different from what we’d expect today,” he said. “We’ve had people who are very well-known academic researchers who came in who were allowed to smoke around materials they were using and to bring their pet dogs in.”
Today, the library’s second floor floods with sunlight, hushed conversation and, in a sign of the times, the steady tap on keyboards, and, with the updated protocol, only pencils — no pens — are allowed around documents.
But the building has also seen — and avoided — more formative moments in the South and the capital’s history.
During the Civil War, for example, as Columbia was ravaged by battle and Gen. William Sherman’s fires, the library — and the Horseshoe — was spared, perhaps, Fulmer said, because of rumors that it was infected with smallpox.
That’s of particular interest to Fulmer, who said he’s worked heavily with and is especially fascinated by the library’s Civil War collections.
“You realize that it was a nation at war with itself — literally brother against brother, household against household,” he said. “Enemy encampments would be across a creek or a stream from each other, and yet they were forbidden from speaking with each other. I think that’s one of the really poignant things that’s pointed out.”
That point and other lessons throughout history, Fulmer believes, are illustrated within the library.
“The other thing that really comes alive here in collections is that human nature is the same regardless of the century in American studies that you look at,” he said. “The motivations that people have today, the things they confide to electronic messages is exactly what you find in people’s private writings in previous centuries.”