Alumnus donates large book collection to MOC
By Phyllis Moore
Published in News on January 4, 2008 1:59 PM
From staff reports
MOUNT OLIVE -- A Mount Olive College alumnus has donated 619 volumes of books to its library.
George Stevenson, who attended MOC in the late 1950s, later returned to the school as a cataloguer a decade later. He is currently employed in the Special Collections Branch of the North Carolina Department of Archives and History.
His affiliation with the college and the Free Will Baptist denomination began long before he was a student there.
He and his siblings grew up in the Free Will Baptist Children's Home in Middlesex following the death of their mother. When he attended MOC, he did much to foster the growth of the Free Will Baptist Historical Collection, the largest known repository of denomination artifacts.
His recent donation consists of 566 titles, including historical biographies, 17th and 18th century economics and politics, histories and historical source material of Virginia, South Carolina and Tennessee. Published abstracts and transcriptions of records of several eastern North Carolina counties and some local histories are also included.
The collection of books is a significant contribution to the library, said Pam Wood, director of library services, "because of the variety of topics, such as William Blake's poetry, the Cherokee Indians, European history and particularly the North Carolina materials. Some of the titles are now out of print, so it would be difficult for us to obtain copies."