On a dark and stormy night in January 1764, as snow and wind whipped across the Yard, a vast conflagration destroyed Harvard Hall. Gone was the stalwart brick building and its roughly 4,600 books. Damaged beyond repair were most of the vital pedagogical scientific instruments, specimens, and objects known as the Philosophical Apparatus. “In a very short time,” University President Edward Holyoke wrote, “this venerable Monument of the Piety of our Ancestors was turn’d into a heap of ruins.” Winter vacation meant the campus was virtually empty, save for members of the Massachusetts General Court. They had moved into the hall to escape a smallpox outbreak in Boston, and the blaze likely began under the hearth in the library, where they had gathered to stay warm.
Some 404 of the College’s precious library books survived the fire: some had not yet been shelved, and others were out on loan. Among those to avoid the flames, perhaps fittingly, was the fourth edition of John Downame’s The Christian Warfare Against the Devill World and Flesh: Wherein is described their nature, the maner of their fight and meanes to obtaine victorye, printed in 1634. There is evidence that the Puritanical spiritual treatise was among the 400 volumes (plus 779 pounds sterling) that John Harvard bequeathed to the College upon his death in 1638. Its survival, as the story goes, is thanks to an undergraduate who, desirous of reading the red leather-bound door-stopper, had snagged it before the break. (It was overdue at the time of the fire.) The book, at times on display at Houghton Library, honors John Harvard himself—and the University’s sometimes-fiery educational mission.
