Hope has had four libraries in its history, and all four buildings still stand. Here is an overview.
Van Vleck Hall
[library years: –1894]
To begin, a very quick origin story: Hope College, which enrolled its first freshman class in the fall of 1862 and was chartered in May 1866, grew out of a preparatory high school called the Holland Academy (also known in later years as Hope Prep), which had itself grown out of the Pioneer School that had been established in 1851 as Holland’s first school. It was upon the founding of the Pioneer School, just four years after Holland’s Dutch settlers had arrived in West Michigan, that the Rev. Albertus C. Van Raalte wrote the words from which Hope’s name and symbol are derived: “This is my Anchor of Hope for this people in the future.”
Completed in 1858, and built for the Holland Academy, Van Vleck Hall is the college’s oldest building. Van Vleck Hall has been a women’s residence hall for several decades, but in its earliest years it housed male students (23 in 1858, out of a total enrollment of 42); the academy principal (and later college president) and his family; and the college’s library. As reported by Hope President Emeritus Wynand Wichers in his book A Century of Hope (pages 106 and 129), the Van Vleck library occupied one room with 4,000 books in 1878, expanding to two rooms and 6,000 books by 1891. (Absent a photo of Van Vleck’s library space, this story features a photograph of what was surely a close cousin in the building: the study of the Rev. Philip Phelps Jr., who came to Holland in 1859 as principal of the academy and served as the college’s founding president from 1866 to 1878.)
The building is named for the Rev. John Van Vleck, who was principal of the Pioneer School and Holland Academy from 1855 to 1859.
(A Random Bonus Fact: Every student’s room had its own kerosene lamp and wood-fired stove. Yes, that was occasionally as problematic as it sounds, but fortunately the building survived.)
Graves Library and Winants Chapel
[library years: 1894–1962]
As literally inscribed in stone on its west-facing wall, the building that generations have known as Graves Hall began its existence in 1894 as home to the growing college’s library (with a stack room that could hold 20,000 volumes) and chapel. When Winants Chapel was outgrown and succeeded by Dimnent Memorial Chapel in 1929, the library expanded into Winants until it again needed more space.
Graves Hall, which was renovated in 1962, 1980 and 2008–09, has housed a variety of offices, programs and departments through the years that have since also found other homes. Among its previous denizens are the Department of World Languages and Cultures, the Department of Sociology and Social Work, the Registrar’s Office, and student organizations including the Anchor student newspaper. Today, the building contains the Children’s After School Achievement (CASA) Program; Step Up; Hope College TRiO Upward Bound; the Saint Anne Oratory at the Carol C. Schaap Chapel, created during 2021–22 in the location of the former Schoon Meditation Chapel; classroom space; Winants Auditorium; and the Presidents’ Room featuring portraits of all of Hope’s presidents.
Graves Hall and Winants Chapel are named in honor of Nathan Graves and Gerrit Winants, respectively. The Graves and Winants families had each contributed $10,000 toward the approximately $40,000 that it is estimated that the building cost to construct. The families’ ties to Hope came through the Reformed Church in America, the college’s parent denomination, whose eastern members provided critical support to Hope in its early years. Nathan Graves, a former mayor of Syracuse, New York, also donated books from his private library to the project.
(A Random Bonus Fact: The large 1860 copy of John James Audubon’s Birds of America on display on the second floor of Van Wylen Library was one of the items contributed by Nathan Graves.)
Van Zoeren Library
[library years: 1962–1987]
Van Zoeren Library, designed with a book capacity of 135,000 volumes, opened in 1962 and served as the college’s library until 1987. During those years, the second floor was a mezzanine, with its center open to the first floor below, and Van Zoeren and VanderWerf Hall (which opened in 1964 as Physics Mathematics Hall) were not connected.
Following the opening of Van Wylen Library in 1988, Van Zoeren was renovated, with the mezzanine turned into a full second floor, and the building was also connected to both VanderWerf and the new library. Today, Van Zoeren houses the Department of Economics and Business, the Department of Education, the Department of Sociology and Social Work, the Office of the Dean of Social Sciences, and the Academic Success Center, as well as classrooms.
The building is named in honor of a leadership gift from Dr. Gerrit John Van Zoeren, a 1912 Hope graduate who had also attended Hope Prep., in memory of his wife, Anna Elizabeth Van Zoeren. As recounted by Wynand Wichers in A Century of Hope (page 233), Van Zoeren was the first Hope graduate to receive a graduate assistantship in chemistry. After earning his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois, he established a business that he sold to Miles Laboratories, enabling him to give Hope more than half a million dollars, which at the time was the largest gift Hope had ever received (equivalent to about $5.3 million in 2025 dollars).
(A Random Bonus Fact: Except for the doors on either end and the mat on the landing, the utilitarian north stairwell is largely unchanged since the library days. To visit it, is to travel back in time. 😃)
Van Wylen Library
[library years: 1988–Present]
The Van Wylen Library, which opened in January 1988, is named for Hope’s ninth president, Dr. Gordon Van Wylen, and his wife, Dr. Margaret Van Wylen, who served as the college’s first couple from 1972 to 1987. The dedication celebration on April 21, 1988, included a parade led by two horseback riders and a campus-wide Renaissance fair to symbolize the rebirth of learning represented by the library.
A few statistics of note from the debut: the 92,000-square-foot building contained more than 11 miles of bookshelves across five levels holding approximately 260,000 volumes. (Conventional wisdom at the time projected that a library’s collection could be expected to double every 25 years, although the Internet has changed that calculation. For example, back issues of magazines and academic journals, formerly published in a bound format that could require several feet of shelving for each title, are now typically available online.)
Today, Van Wylen holds about 285,000 volumes – along with 1,301,675 electronic resources.
One especially noteworthy feature of the building, which was a priority of its design: the creation of the Joint Archives of Holland. Located on the ground level and including the Rare Book Reading Room, the Joint Archives combined the archival collections of the college, Western Theological Seminary and the City of Holland. The city has since moved its collection to the Holland Museum, Holland’s former post office, but Archives and Special Collections continues to contract with Western Theological Seminary and other organizations to maintain their collections. The Archives office relocated to the neighboring Theil Research Center for several years but recently returned to Van Wylen.
(A Random Bonus Fact: The oldest volume in the college’s Rare Book Collection is the Mammotrectus Super Bibliam, a Latin-language Bible printed in Venice, Italy, in 1476, donated to the college by Dr. Everett Welmers ’32 in 1993.)
Library Awards Since 1988
Across the decades since the Van Wylen Library opened in 1988, the library and members of the staff have won multiple awards. In its first months, the library earned national recognition including one of just 13 citations awarded to new educational facilities across the United States from the publication American School and University (1988); a feature in library-architecture issue of Library Journal (1988); and an Award for Excellence for Library Architecture from the American Institute of Architecture (1989). In 2004, the Van Wylen Library was named the national winner in the college category of the “Excellence in Academic Libraries Award” presented by the Association of College and Research Libraries. In 2011, the library received a Citation of Excellence from the Library of Michigan Foundation. In 2022, Jeremy Barney, who is associate librarian for metadata and digital collections, was named the Academic Librarian of the Year by the Michigan Academic Library Association.