Handle With Care

Williams Collection Finds a Home at MSU Library
Photo by Russ Houston

June 27, 2017

Staff members at MSU's Mitchell Memorial Library move boxes this week containing items from an unparalleled private Lincoln and Civil War collection amassed over the past 50 years by former Rhode Island Chief Justice Frank J. Williams. A nationally known Abraham Lincoln authority, Judge Williams, along with his wife Virginia Williams, is donating what is considered the nation's largest privately owned holding of Lincoln research and display material, as well as the country's most comprehensive privately owned Lincoln and Civil War library to Mississippi State University.