Exciting New Digital Resource for Washington Legal History Buffs: Beardsley’s Bench and Bar of Washington: The First Fifty Years (1849–1900)
Arthur Beardsley was the founding director of the University of Washington’s Law Library. He served in that position from 1922–1944 and during his tenure built the collection to over 100,000 volumes with a strong foreign law emphasis including English, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese concentrations. He founded the University of Washington’s law librarianship program and left his footprint on generations of law libraries. Beardsley was also a scholar, archivist, and historian. During his tenure at UW, he compiled a vast archive of materials on early Washington legal luminaries. As a student, I remember going down to the scary, dark basement of the law library at Condon Hall and seeing the file cabinets that held what was called the bench and bar files. Each legal luminary had a file folder with news clippings, correspondence, photographs, and various other ephemera tucked in. One could easily lose track of time sifting through all those bits of history—despite being in a dark, scary basement.
Beardsley used this collection as the basis for his manuscript of the early history of the legal profession in Washington state. The manuscript was titled “The Bench and Bar of Washington: The First Fifty Years 1849–1900” but it was never published. That is, until now. The Gallagher law library recently announced that Beardsley’s manuscript has been digitized and is now available for free via the UW Law Digital Commons. https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/benchbar/
I spoke with Maya Swanes and Pearl McCrea, librarians at the Gallagher law library to find out a bit more about the project.
BE: How did the idea for digitizing the Beardsley manuscript come about?
MS, PM: The original ideal for digitizing this came after we had a request from a law student at Seattle U who wanted to view it for a project she was doing for a professor. At that point Pearl and I realized that it was nearly impossible to easily navigate through the physical version of the manuscript and thought it would be a thousand times more useful in a digital, searchable format.
BE: Was there a lot of prep that went into getting it ready for digitizing?
MS, PM: We didn’t have to do too much prep work as the original manuscript (which is on very delicate onion skin paper) had already been photocopied some years ago. The library acquired a fancy scanner a few years back and we have a really useful document feeder which allows for quicker digitization of loose papers like this. There was a fair amount of quality control that had to happen, though, as the photocopies are not great and there are portions of the pages that could not be converted into machine-readable text (OCRed) because the quality was poor.
BE: Who did the digitization work and how long did it take?
MS, PM: The actual digitization was completed by our wonderful law librarianship interns as part of their work with our technical services department (now called Collections, Resources, and Information Management). The interns worked in one-hour stints over the course of two Quarters.
BE: Any other fun tidbits about the digitization project I could share??
MS, PM: This was a pretty straightforward project, but I think it is going to be well-used. Since I uploaded the materials last week, we’ve already had about 40 downloads of individual chapters.
The Manuscript
The manuscript is divided into 42 chapters, some of which focus on specific jurisdictions such as “Ch. 14 The Early Bar of Central Washington and the Inland Empire, Ch. 33 The Bench and Bar of Snohomish County, or Ch. 35 The Bar of Seattle in Later Years.” Others focus on specific people such as “Ch. 20 Tax Litigation Culminates in the Tragedy of Bion F. Kedal, Ch. 9 Settlers Charged with Treason; Governor Stevens Reprieves Himself, Ch.8 The Trial of Leschi.”
A major part of the source material for the manuscript was Beardsley’s correspondence with judges and attorneys which helped him piece together the historical vignettes from the manuscript. In Carissa Vogel’s article, Rediscovering Dr. Arthur S. Beardsley: A Brief Introduction to His Life and Work, she discussed the manuscript, his reliance on the labors of student workers, and her research into his correspondence about it:
The manuscript exists in several drafts; the first was written out long-hand and includes many notes about reworking the contents. In the disintegrating envelopes that held these drafts were scores of pages of notes recopied from books, letters, and articles. These pages must represent the fruits of this subsidized labor and helps to explain how Beardsley had the time to attend to his vast correspondence.
Beardsley’s early letters reveal how he conceived and thought about the Bench and Bar project. He lamented that, though the library had been trying to find data about a number of Washington’s early lawyers and judges, most of them have long been forgotten and in their passing, had left little information concerning themselves. Describing the purpose and scope of the project to a friend, Beardsley wrote:
For some time past we have been engaged in collecting the photographs of the early lawyers and judges of Washington in order to preserve as a memorial and as an inspiration to the young lawyers to come. We feel that now is the time to collect and preserve the early history of our bench and bar, particularly those which relate to the early territorial lawyers and those who came to Washington shortly after statehood.1
An avid and skilled book procurer and curator, Beardsley also used research for the manuscript as an opportunity to add early Washington legal materials to the UW law library’s collection.
Besides photographs and biographical sketches of the early Bench and Bar, Beardsley also requested the writings of Washington lawyers as part of the historical collection he was building for the library. He described the kind of material the library wanted to add:
…We are pleased to have it for our collection of books by Washington lawyers. This collection, I might state, now consists of over five hundred items, including books, monographs, papers, etc. written by Washington lawyers. The collection is not confined to legal writings but to anything which represents the literary efforts on the part of the bar, excluding, of course, briefs and pleadings.
Beardsley’s requests generated a variety of responses. Many of those he requested information from were appreciative of the attention being paid to them or their relatives.2
No doubt, the fruits of Beardsley’s acquisitions labor is sure to still reside in the Gallagher law library’s collection.
Dig Deeper
If you are Washington legal history buff, I encourage you to check out the digitized manuscript of Beardsley’s Bench and Bar of Washington, The First Fifty Years (1849–1940). If you want to dig even deeper, the source material from all of Beardsley’s original bench and bar files is available in the Gallagher law library’s special collections. And no, you won’t have to trudge down to a dark, scary basement! Contact the Gallagher law library for more information on obtaining access.
Maya and Pearl had an additional plug for their digital repository.
We hope to keep digitizing useful materials we have and adding them to the repository. We already have a pretty robust collection of briefs related to the Boldt Decision (collection is here) and other WA State materials (here).
Other Questions About Historical Research?
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If you have questions about legal research, becoming a subscriber, or any other law related topics, feel free to contact the law library at services@kcll.org.
1 Carissa Vogel, Rediscovering Dr. Arthur S. Beardsley: A Brief Introduction to His Life and Work (2008), pgs. 11-12. https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/law-lib_borgeson/113
2 Id at 13.
