Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
When Grace Theological Seminary moved back to Winona Lake in 1939 from its founding location in Akron, Ohio, part of the incentive to relocate was the availability of a good theological library.
G. Campbell Morgan, the renowned British theologian, had founded the Winona School of Theology in 1920. The school occupied buildings on the site of Bethany Camp, today’s Winona Lake town park. Theology classes were in summer only, so its 6,000 volume library sat unused all winter. Making it available to the Grace theology students proved to be an incentive and a blessing to the fledgling school.
Later, when McClain Hall was constructed in 1951-52, a wing of the building’s second floor was set aside to house Grace’s library, which had now grown considerably. The addition of Grace College (founded 1948, expanded to four years in 1954), necessitated a much larger, richer research resource.
By now there were four buildings comprising the Grace campus — McClain Hall (1952), Philathea classroom building and the Lancer gymnasium (1958) and Alpha Hall (1954), a combination dorm and dining facility.
The local paper reported on Dec. 26, 1964, that Dr. Herman Hoyt, president of Grace College, announced a $650,000 library would be constructed on the campus of the college at Winona Lake, beginning in March 1966. Max Fluke was named construction superintendent, and construction began on the site of the former groundskeeper’s house, adjacent to Wooster Road.
On a wintry March day in 1969, the entire Grace student body helped move the books and library holdings from the second-floor library in McClain Hall to the new Morgan Library. Working under the direction and planning of Mabel Hamilton, Grace’s librarian, the students formed a human chain and passed boxes of books along the line until all 40,000 books were moved. The entire process took about three hours.
The library underwent several internal expansions in 1981 and 1998, when the remaining classrooms and faculty offices were moved from the library.
The library was named the Morgan Library as a tribute to Mrs. Betty Zimmer Morgan of Warsaw, who in May 1972 gave the largest gift ever received by the school at that time. She gave $100,000, pledged over four years. Betty Morgan was the daughter and only child of the founder of Zimmer Manufacturing Co., the late Justin Zimmer, who started the company in 1927.
In a letter of presentation, Mrs. Morgan said she was making the gift, “because of the dynamic influence of Grace College in our community and because of the high caliber of students at Grace.” Mrs. Morgan died at age 91 in May 2006 in Warsaw, Indiana. After the Zimmer company was sold to Bristol-Myers Squibb in 1972, she focused on many philanthropic projects, including the Greenway Project, the Salvation Army, Baker Youth Clubs and more.
When the story of the library’s relocation is re-told, usually by visiting alumni, generations of new students marvel at the engineering and planning that led to a human chain executing a well-thought-out plan to prepare the new library to serve future generations of Grace students.
