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Thomas B. Lockwood (1873-1947) and Marion Birge Lockwood (1881-1932) gave $500,000 for a library building for the University of Buffalo. Mr. Lockwood worked closely with Buffalo architect E. B. Green (1855-1950) in the design of the building and was involved with every detail of its construction. Writing in the New York Times on June 23, 1935, Philip Brooks describes the new library as "a beautiful building and a noble monument to book collecting. All that modern architecture could suggest in the way of design and equipment, and that a generous benefactor could provide, has been lavished upon the library in order to make it the last word in institutional luxury."
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The orginial Lockwood Memoral Library plaque |
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The library is "the veritable corner-stone upon which the whole intellectual structure of the university rests."
-- Samuel P. Capen
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The original Lockwood Memorial Library was dedicated on May 15, 1935, with remarks made by Christopher Morley (1890-1957), author and editor of the Saturday Review of Literature. "For every institution of higher learning the one perennially indispensable possession is a library," Chancellor Samuel P. Capen (1878-1956) said in his dedicatory address. "New disciplines may arise and old disciplines totally disappear. The social purposes of universities may be completely altered, as they have been over and over again since universities were first established. But the dependence of a university upon its library does not abate. Books do not become less important as universities open up new intellectual territory and devise new ways of probing the mysteries of nature and of human life. They become ever more important."
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