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In the summer of 1840, Queen’s didn’t yet exist. The colonial legislature had given its blessing to the project, and a royal charter from Queen Victoria would arrive the next year, but at that time there were no buildings, no faculty, and no students. The school had only one physical asset: books.

In July of 1840, a letter addressed to “any authorized agent for managing [the] affairs of Queen’s College, Kingston” arrived, announcing an unexpected gift to the unbuilt institution. The letter came with a bundle of books. The university’s first benefactor was – Judge James Mitchell of the London District in western Upper Canada. Aberdeen-born, he had immigrated to Canada as a tutor.

After he arrived in Canada, the young educator served as a militia captain in the War of 1812. Mitchell then became a leading educator and founder of grammar schools, a prominent landowner, and finally, in 1819, judge of the London District, a post he would hold until his death from cholera in 1853. He strongly believed that education was the key to progress in the young colony.

Judge Mitchell was a friend of the prominent Anglican bishop John Strachan, so it’s a bit surprising that he sent his books to Queen’s, as Bishop Strachan was president of Toronto’s King’s College, the forerunner to today’s University of Toronto. Nonetheless, Judge Mitchell decided Queen’s College should receive the gift of six rare and precious volumes:

• a Greek lexicon
• a 16th-century Latin Bible
• New Testaments in French and in Greek
• a two-volume 1760 copy of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding

With no library, Queen’s founders stored the books in the tower of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in downtown Kingston. Once the royal charter was obtained in 1841, the Mitchell donation became the kernel of the Queen’s library system. By the 1870s, the Queen’s Journal was complaining that the college’s library in the Old Medical Building was “choked up with books.”

Today, the Queen’s library system boasts several million physical volumes, plus countless more articles, books and materials online. The Mitchell Collection still forms part of the W.D. Jordan Special Collections and Music Library.