Wade Hall Collection of Foreign Language Letters

A Union Springs, Alabama, native, Wade Henry Hall was the first in his family to graduate from high school. He continued his education earning a BS from Troy University, a MA from The University of Alabama, and a PhD from the University of Illinois. He went on to become a distinguished college professor and one of Alabama’s most widely published and versatile authors. He wrote numerous works relating to Kentucky, Alabama, and Southern history, including The Kentucky Anthology: 200 Years of Writing in the Bluegrass State, One Man’s Lincoln, and Conecuh People: Words of Life from the Alabama Black Belt.

Hall taught English and served as chair of the English and Humanities programs at Kentucky Southern College (1962-1969) and Bellarmine University (1969-1996) in Louisville, Kentucky, for almost forty years. He retired in 1996 and returned to Union Springs, Alabama, in 2006.

Hall was an avid collector, focusing primarily on items related to Southern history and culture. His interests were wide-ranging and included books, music, manuscripts, photographs, and quilts. He donated significant portions of his collections to the universities of Alabama, Troy, and Kentucky as well as to art museums in Birmingham and Mobile, Alabama, and Columbus, Georgia. The manuscripts collection here gathers together letters, journals, and other papers from the middle of the nineteenth through the whole of the twentieth century and allows researchers to see the world through the lives of everyday Americans, demonstrating the value of ordinary people’s perspectives to researchers interested in American history, literature, and culture.

Hall died on September 26, 2015, aged 81, after a long illness.