Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary: Kathryn Sullivan Bowld Music Library

The George C. Stebbins Collection contains over 1,120 items and includes hymnals, sacred songbooks, histories, biographies, and scrapbooks related to American hymnody. Although the collection contains materials dating from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, the essence of the collection is gospel hymnody of the revivalistic period of the nineteenth century. Assembled mostly by the Rev. James Benjamin Clayton, whose desire was “to include all, and exclude none, of the varied manifestations of evangelistic song, thus furnishing an ample and unbiased mass of material for the study of the origins, development, and distribution of the Gospel hymn,” the collection was housed at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., beginning in 1930. Through the efforts of Dr. William J. Reynolds and Dr. Carl R. Wrotenbery, the collection was transferred to Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1988 and is now housed in the Robert S. Douglass Treasure Room inside the Kathryn Sullivan Bowld Music Library. The collection also includes items from around the world and in various languages. To view the titles in the Stebbins Collection, access the SWBTS Library Online Catalog, and use “Stebbins Collection” (without the quotation marks) as the title. The Eugene Maston collection contains approximately 2,247 titles.  The collection contains a large portion of 19th and 20th century songbooks in addition to a number of rarer items from the 17th and 18th centuries.  One outstanding example is a 1620 printing of Claude Goudimel’s settings of the psalms.  While numerous editions of this work were made available during the late 16th and early 17th centuries, Bowld Music Library now holds the only copy of this work in an American institution, printed by Andreas Clouck, a printer of theological books in Leyden.  Son of the late Baptist ethicist T. B. Maston, professor at Southwestern for 41 years (1922-1963), Eugene Maston studied first at Baylor and then received a Bachelor of Divinity from Southwestern Seminary.  It was through the efforts of the late Dr. William J. Reynolds, Eugene Maston chose to give a portion of his collection to the Kathryn Sullivan Bowld Music Library.