Anson Phelps Stokes Autograph Collection

The Stokes Autograph Collection was formed by the Reverend Anson Phelps Stokes (1875-1958) mainly during the 22 years he served as Secretary of the University from 1899 to 1921. From 1924 to 1939 he served as Canon of the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral in Washington, D.C. The collection was made "for the purpose of creating a deeper and more intelligent interest in Yale history and biography." Letters of the most important alumni, accompanied by engravings and printed sketches taken from Appleton's CYCLOPOEDIA OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY (1887) were exhibited for a number of years in Woolsey Hall. The Reverend Stokes commemorated 158 of the Yale men represented in the collection in his MEMORIALS OF EMINENT YALE MEN (Yale University Press, 1914), and twenty letters from the collection are printed in the two-volume work. The forward quoted below describes the purpose of the collection.

After his death in 1958, President A. Whitney Griswold eulogized the Reverend Stokes in the following words: "Anson Phelps Stokes was one of the great men in Yale's history. Yale owes much of its present strength to his devotion to the university ideal and his farsighted and forceful pursuit of that ideal during his career as Secretary. Thereafter, as a leader in both religion and learning, his services to church and civil state fulfilled abundantly the terms of Yale's charter. All Yale men are grateful to him and will honor his memory."