The Farnsworth Room

The Farnsworth Room under Florence Milner’s supervision held special significance for many undergraduates.  Mrs. Milner aimed to shape undergraduates’ minds and reading habits by curating a collection of “Standard Literature." Half the room’s collection was English literature from Beowulf to Edith Wharton, with an emphasis on older classics, including novels, essays, poetry, criticism, and biographies.  By introducing students to good books. Mrs. Milner hoped to be a positive cultural influence.  Under Mrs. Milner, the Farnsworth Room was truly a “gentleman’s library”: a luxurious room where young men learned proper conduct and proper literary taste.  David McCord, an alumnus reflecting on the room in 1947, described the Farnsworth Room as “the library of a cultivated person,” and stated that “a time for any man to lay the foundations of his life’s reading is in his later school days, his college or university years.  If he has not acquired, by the time he is thirty, a few shelves of good and lasting books which for him are always ‘home to the instant need of things,’ he has neglected or lost not the least valuable part of his education.”   

A retired English teacher and principal from a boy’s school in Michigan, Mrs. Milner understood and was beloved by the young men who frequented the Farnsworth Room. A 1929 profile on Mrs. Milner in National Magazine explores her special charm:

“In this room it is Mrs. Milner’s ‘something’ indefinable that has made supervision a grateful, tactful method when rebuke is necessary which it seldom is…The very absence of rules is one of the interesting phases of Mrs. Milner’s conduct of the room….Another element in her manner of administration is that of letting her readers alone.”  

At a point when Widener was not particularly hospitable to undergraduates, many found it liberating to freely explore new books.

Even as Mrs. Milner avoided dictating students’ reading choices, a set of rules governing conduct was strictly enforced, including no smoking, sprawling on chairs, note-taking, or studying of any kind.  In her scrapbooks, Mrs. Milner loved to record stories about disciplining unruly undergraduates.  In one such instance, a student came into the room and was choosing between reading “The Broad Highway” and “The Amateur Gentleman,” finally settling on “The Broad Highway.”  A few minutes later, she found him “lolling lazily” with his feet on a chair, and, much to his chagrin, she remarked that he should have picked “The Amateur Gentleman” instead.

In Mrs. Milner’s scrapbooks, which she kept throughout her tenure as curator of the Farnsworth Room, are letters and quotes from alumni and former room attendants detailing how much the Room meant to them.  As one freshman in 1919 said, “It’s different from any other place in college for there’s a personal touch.  It’s something to write home about.”  A former student assistant of the room, writing to Mrs. Milner in 1920, said, “Of all the friends I made outside of my college-fellows, you were the best and dearest of all.”