Burrage Library: the little stone fortress at Olivet College

It looks less like a college library than a small castle that wandered into Eaton County and decided to stay. Burrage Library went up in 1890 at the center of the Olivet College campus. Everything about it is heavy and deliberate. The walls are rough-faced Ionia sandstone in mottled browns and pinks, set on a granite base. The windows are deep-set, like arrow slits. Two octagonal towers anchor an asymmetrical, off-balance front. The style is Richardsonian Romanesque, the muscular look that was the height of American taste in the 1880s. The architect, Arthur Bates Jennings, gave the little college a serious dose of it.

The building exists because two people paid for it. Leonard Burrage put up the gift that carries his name, with help from Lucy E. Tuttle. The college’s longtime librarian, Joseph L. Daniels, pushed the project through. Olivet is a small Michigan school. It was founded in 1844 by Oberlin missionaries, and it was famous for educating women and Black students early. For a college like that, a stone library of this ambition was a statement. It said books mattered here, and that they intended to keep them safe.

The stone is the part worth lingering on. Ionia sandstone came out of quarries to the northwest. It turned up in courthouses and churches all over mid-Michigan in this era. Builders prized it because it cut well and weathered to a warm, uneven color. On Burrage it was laid in big rock-faced blocks. They still catch the light differently in every season.

Generations of Olivet students have climbed those steps with an armful of books. They pass the towers and go through the thick stone doorway. Inside is a reading room that has been doing the same patient work since Benjamin Harrison was president.