Ida Jane Dacus
Ida Jane Dacus was the first professionally trained librarian in the state of South Carolina.
Early life and education
Ida Jane Dacus was born in Williamston, South Carolina, to John Arving Dacus and Sara Elizabeth Hogg, the first of four children.She attended Williamston Female Academy, which is now Lander University. She then went to Winthrop Normal and Industrial College in Rock Hill in 1896, the first year the school held classes. She was one of the three girls awarded a scholarship to care for the school's library, which had two hundred books and a study hall at the time. Following her junior year, Dacus was asked by Winthrop President David Bancroft Johnson, to take over the full-time position of the head of the school's library. She was appointed at a salary of $20 per month plus board.
In 1901, Dacus took a nationwide competitive exam and won a scholarship to Drexel Institute in Philadelphia to study library science. The following year, she received her certificate along with fifteen others and became the first trained librarian, not only in South Carolina, but the entirety of the Southern states as a whole.
Impact
When Ida Jane Dacus began as head librarian at Winthrop University, the holdings numbered 5,184 books and 5,000 volumes of government publications. In 1905, the Carnegie Foundation gave $20,000 to build a college library. In January 1906, they increased the sum to $30,000 plus 500 books if the new library would offer library methods and act as a training school that opened the following June. In 1907, Dacus inaugurated two classes in library science--the first class in reference and the second class in elementary library methods for schoolteachers. Her work was so respected that instructors of library methods from around the country began using her courses at their institutions. Library method courses that were rare to see in 1907 had become the norm by the late 1920s.Dacus was an active professional and regularly attended meetings of the South Carolina Teachers’ Association, the National Education Association, and the American Library Association. She was known as “Miss Ida" to Winthrop scholars. Dacus shared her love of growing flowers and created the “Miss Dacus Garden,” a spot on the campus at Winthrop University.
Later life and legacy
In 1969, the Ida Jane Dacus Library was built, replacing the Carnegie Library, which is now known as Rutledge Hall. The library was named after Ida Jane Dacus, who served as the official Winthrop Librarian from 1902 to 1945 and was an alumna of 1898.Dacus retired in 1945 at age seventy after working at the library for 43 years. Following a short illness, Dacus died on October 18,1964, and was buried in the Williamston Cemetery. In her retirement, she supervised the operations of her Williamston home place, a three-hundred-acre cotton farm, and found time for extensive gardening, apron making, and quilt collecting.