An assistant who rose to become head librarian, Helen Mellen cared for the university’s books and readers for half a century
Helen Mellen saw the Tufts library grow from a single room in Ballou Hall to a thriving operation with multiple branches. Illustration: Katy Lemay
In 1869, the Tufts library was much smaller than it is today. Its 12,000 books were crammed in a single room in Ballou Hall, so small that students were discouraged from studying there unless they were doing research at the direction of an instructor.
Originally President Hosea Ballou’s private collection, the library’s holdings grew thanks to alumni donations of books and funds. The student-sponsored Reading Room Association also chipped in by giving the university the dog-eared back copies of the dozen daily and weekly papers it subscribed to.
The whole operation was overseen by one woman: Helen Louisa Mellen.
Born in 1836 to a merchant father and a mother descended from Mayflower Pilgrim John Alden, Mellen was deeply interested in medicine and probably would have gone to medical school if she had been born in a later era, according to Russell Miller’s 1986 Light on the Hill: a history of Tufts College, 1852-1952. She grew up in Somerville learning French and music from private tutors.
At 33, Mellen became an assistant at Tufts College’s library, beginning nearly 50 years of service. She supported William Shipman, the chairman of the faculty committee that managed the library.
In 1883 Mellen moved into what came to be called Mellen House at 126 Packard Avenue. She lived there with her sister, taking in student boarders (then a common practice among faculty and staff).
“The [boarders] always refer with gratitude to kindnesses received at her hands,” Miller writes. “She became familiar with most of the other students of the college and earned the respect of everyone with whom she came in contact.”
In 1884, Mellen became the university’s first full-time librarian. At the time, the new practice of binding and indexing periodicals was increasing their circulation, she noted in an 1884 annual report to trustees. Total circulation was up to 1,721.
In 1884 Tufts also launched its first fundraising drive dedicated to the library. Alumni donated some $1,100 over two years, although many gifts were restricted. One donation, for example, was not to be used for the purchase of prose fiction (which accounted for 21% of circulation that year, the largest category). Another gift was not to be spent on religious or theological texts (the sixth largest circulation category at 8%).
Two years later, Mellen helped move the collection into what was intended as an interim location—a dormitory called Middle Hall (today Packard Hall), which had been enlarged to accommodate up to 50,000 volumes. That decade, the library received numerous gifts of several hundred volumes and became a partial depository for government documents.
To open up more space, a biology professor moved a number of volumes into the first branch library in Barnum Museum, then located in Barnum Hall, in 1892. Growth picked up in 1896, when trustees accepted a proposal from students to add a $1 fee to their term bills to buy more periodicals through the Reading Room Association.
The collection was boosted yet more three years later when, at the suggestion of Tufts’ third president, Hewitt Capen, Shipman wrote 60 fundraising letters to alumni, beginning the library’s first annual appeal and first permanent fund.
In 1904, Mellen became head librarian, taking on Shipman’s responsibilities. With no help other than the occasional student assistant, she catalogued book donations and purchases, meticulously tracked faculty and student library use and missing books, and hand-wrote annual reports to the Tufts trustees.
Tufts built Eaton Library in 1906, supported by a $100,000 donation from the industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, who funded the construction of more than 2,500 libraries worldwide. The new library was named after the Carnegie family’s minister, the Rev. Charles Henry Eaton, A1874, AG1887.
Mellen retired from the head librarian position a year later, in 1907, and received the title of Librarian Emeritus and a Carnegie pension of $450 a year—to which the Tufts trustees added $50 a year in honor of her long service, according to Miller. ($500 in 1907 would be roughly $17,230 today.)
At the time of Mellen’s retirement, the library had 56,000 volumes, compared to the 2.7 million volumes that are housed today at Tisch Library, which was built as Wessell Library in 1965 and renamed and renovated in the late 1990s. (Eaton Hall now houses the departments of anthropology, religion, and sociology, among others.)
After her retirement, Mellen continued to attend faculty meetings, although her health was failing.
The following year, she died in her family’s original home in Somerville in the care of Irene Sperry, who was described in Light on the Hill as her long-term, faithful companion.
