Joseph Penn Breedlove

Breedlove was born in 1874 at the Joseph P. Hunt Farm in Granville County, North Carolina near Oxford, to John Henry Breedlove, owner of the Breedlove Mill, and Susan Caroline Hunt Breedlove, a descendant of North Carolina Declaration of Independence signer John Penn. He was educated at Horner Military School, followed by a year at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. He transferred to Trinity College, completing a B.A. in 1898 and an M.A. in 1902, both in English. While at Trinity he played on the baseball team and was a member of the 9019 Society, Kappa Alpha Order, Omicron Delta Kappa, and Phi Beta Kappa. ==Career==

Breedlove was appointed by Trinity College president John Carlisle Kilgo as the full-time librarian in September 1898. The library at that time consisted of some 11,000 volumes donated by faculty and literary societies, housed in a single room in the Washington Duke Building. His first task was to catalog and classify the library's contents. In 1900, he studied library science under William I. Fletcher at Amherst College and also consulted with Charles Ammi Cutter. and, as the collection grew, he labored to manage the flood of donations and purchases amid staff shortages. Breedlove was able to supplement his team of part-time student assistants with the hiring in 1914 of a full-time professional cataloger, Eva Earnshaw Malone, former librarian at Meredith College. Opening in 1927, it held the entire collection until the completion of the General Library in 1930 (renamed for William R. Perkins in 1966) on the new West Campus. The move to the General Library involved additional complexity as separate libraries were established for individual departments and schools including Biology, Chemistry, Divinity, Forestry, Law, and Medicine. The rapid growth "from an insignificant college collection to one of the great national libraries of the country" continued throughout the 1930s and 1940s with a million books and over two million manuscripts and other documents in the collection, managed by a staff of 70, at the end of his tenure. He returned to his librarian duties in 1943 during World War II until retiring again in 1946. Notable former members of his library staff included Benjamin E. Powell, William Porter Kellam, Mortimer Taube, and Lawrence Quincy Mumford. ==Later life and legacy==

He spent his later years as Librarian Emeritus performing assigned duties and working on a history of the Duke libraries. After he died at his home in 1955, a funeral service was held at the Duke University Chapel, followed by burial in Durham's Maplewood Cemetery. The Durham Morning Herald added, Under Breedlove's guidance, the library grew from a one-room collection of unclassified and ill-arranged books to one of the leading university libraries in the nation. The home he built in 1915 at 407 Watts Street in Durham's Trinity Historic District, a "restrained Neo-Classical design reminiscent of the more elaborate (former) Watts Hospital", was designated an historic site with a plaque from the Historic Preservation Society of Durham in 2006. The Joseph P. Breedlove Papers, 1913-1950 (2000 items) are archived at the Rubenstein Library. ==Publications==

Selected books and articles ordered by year: • • • • • • • • • • • ==Personal life==

His first marriage in 1905 to Bessie Wilson Bassett (1879–1912), sister of John Spencer Bassett, produced one daughter, Bessie Bassett (1912–1997). His second marriage in 1917 to Lucile Aiken (1885–1970) produced a daughter, Susan Caroline (1918–1995), and a son, Joseph Penn Jr. (1919–2005). A third child, John Hester (b. 1927), died in infancy. ==References==