
Through the work of several prominent faculty members, most notably George W. Paschal and Charles C. Pearson, the collection continued to expand. But it was through the efforts of Ethel Taylor Crittenden, Wake Forest's librarian from 1915 to 1946, that the North Carolina Baptist Historical Collection became officially designated by the Baptist State Convention as the repository for all North Carolina Baptist historical materials and records. The daughter of the college's sixth president, Charles E. Taylor (1884-1905), Crittenden collected her father's papers and received donations from the North Carolina Baptist Historical Society and the state convention. In 1970 the North Carolina Baptist Historical Collection was renamed in her honor. The modern Ethel Taylor Crittenden Collection in Baptist History contains a vast amount of materials dating from the 1770s to the present, including more than 16,000 books and other publications and hundreds of biographical and autobiographical materials relating to Southern, Missionary, Primitive, African American, and other Baptist churches in the state. The collection, located in a wing of the Z. Smith Reynolds Library, is now almost exclusively supported by Wake Forest University, with its connection to the North Carolina Baptist State Convention diminished.