The Marlene and Nathan Addlestone Library, completed in 2005 on a site once occupied by Bishop England High School (see below), is the main research, reference and reading library of the College of Charleston and also houses the Special Collections division, of which The Hibernofiles forms part.

 

The archives of the South Carolina Historical Society were transferred to the Addlestone from that institution's downtown headquarters in 2014, and has expanded the library's commitment to serve the general public as well as the academic community in the research of community, institutional and personal history.

 

You can access the library section of the college website at  http://www.cofc.edu/library/libraries/index.php

 

 

SOME HISTORICAL CONNECTIONS

 

- Bishop England High School was founded in 1915 in a building near Broad Street that had been used as a temporary cathedral for the Catholic diocese of Charleston. After being housed in two other temporary locations, it moved in 1922 to a new building at the corner of Calhoun and Coming Streets, where it expanded over the next two generations. Named for John England (1785-1842), the Charleston dioceses's founding bishop, the school finally moved to a new campus on Daniel Island, a new suburb and satellite component of the City of Charleston, in 1998. The school has a special place in the history of the Irish community in Charleston, having provided education of most of them over the century of its existence.

 

- The first senior academic to lead the College of Charleston faculty after its establishment in the late  18th. century was Simon Felix Gallagher, a Dublin-born Catholic priest and scientist who has come to minister to the parishioners at St. Mary's Church in Hassell Street. He served as professor and acting president at the college at various times over a period of almost two decades. You can read more about him here.

 

- The plaza in front of the Addlestone Library contains a memorial to the founders of Pi Kappa Phi, a fraternity established in 1904 by Andrew Kroeg, Laurence Mixson and Simon Fogarty, three students at the college. Simon was a son of a Broad Street grocer who had come to Charleston with his family from Kilkenny in Ireland at the age of ten (you can read more about him here).   In 2004, the fraternity's Centennial Commission, which numbered nearly 260 members, provided leadership for an enhanced celebration and critical funding of a centennial gift—a 40-foot bell tower adorned with plaques bearing the images of  three founders was erected in the fraternity’s honor.