Edwin C. Bolles Collection

Edwin Courtland Bolles was a Universalist pastor and scholar with a robust enthusiasm for history and theology. He was born on September 19, 1836. He attended Trinity College, completing his undergraduate education in 1855. He continued at Trinity to receive his M.A. in 1859, before obtaining a doctorate from St. Lawrence University in 1860. Bolles served as a pastor throughout the Northeast United States and in the South before the outbreak of the Civil War. He lived in London throughout the 1870s, where he amassed a large collection of books (including some rare early printed titles), pamphlets, maps, and other material pertaining to the history of London. After returning to the U.S., he obtained a doctorate of sacred theology at Tufts University in 1880. He served a nine-year term as a trustee of Tufts beginning in 1880, and began lecturing at the divinity school at the end of this term. He became the school’s first chaplain in 1905 and taught English and American History. 

Bolles’ interest in London history continued after he returned to America, and his endeavor to augment and link Walter Thornbury's Old and New London with more than 8,000 pictures he had collected led him to develop a reference system reminiscent of modern “hypertext.” He and his assistants completed the work a year before he died in January 11, 1920 at his home, now named Bolles House, which, as of 2005, houses the LGBTQ+ and Latino Center on Tufts Medford Campus. His collection was purchased by the Tufts trustees in 1921 and was given to Eaton Library as a memorial to the late professor. It remains today one of the largest named collections in Tisch Special Collections.