Allis (O.T. Allis) Collection

The bulk of the Allis Collection relates to his work as a teacher, writer, and an editor. One noteworthy feature of the collection is the amount of correspondence. Allis was not only a prolific letter-writer; he was also an early adopter of the typewriter and kept carbon copies of many of the letters he sent. Interested researchers will be able, in many cases, to reconstruct the “conversation” between Allis and his correspondents. The subject matter of the correspondence ranges from the intensely personal to the very formally professional. Many of the letters are to and from aspiring contributors to the PTR. Allis’s role as the editor brought him into contact with a wide variety of ministers and educators from across the world. Allis’s other letters reveal a man who was actively engaged in the controversies of his time. His letters to Daniel S. Gage (1863-1951), a professor at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri; Samuel G. Craig (1874-1960), one of the founders of the Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company; and Clarence E. Macartney, a prominent PCUSA minister in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, reveal a man who was deeply concerned about the institutions with which he was involved and the implications of modernism for the church as a whole. There is also considerable correspondence involving the American Bible Society, for which Allis served on multiple committees and boards, and the magazine Christianity Today.

Another singular feature of this collection is the ability to see Allis’s writings in the process of development through his typewritten and handwritten manuscripts. Though not all of his published works are represented in draft form in this collection, there are copious drafts of The Old Testament; Its Claims and Critics and the unpublished Modern Dispensationalism. These drafts, along with the other handwritten and typewritten notes, point to a man whose mind was always working, sometimes on more than one subject at any given moment.

Researchers with interest in the PCUSA controversies of the 1920s, the conflict at PTS, and the founding of WTS will find a great deal in the Allis collection. Those with an interest in the history and development of prominent parachurch organizations in the twentieth-century, especially the American Bible Society and Christianity Today, will find much information in the Allis papers as well. Several additional elements of the collection are worth noting. Included in the collection in the Legal-size and Oversize series are newspapers and newspaper clippings, many of which pertain to the PCUSA and PTS debates in the 1920s. Where possible, newsprint has been transferred to acid-free paper for preservation purposes.

Also within the collection are his index card files. Allis used 3x5 inch cards and sheets of paper extensively throughout his career, and researchers will find many examples in the Handwritten Manuscripts subseries. There are also four boxes that contain the index cards that Allis or someone close to him arranged prior to the collection’s donation. Most of these pertain to Allis’s books, but there are several cards in IC-029.001 that record information about conflicts in the PCUSA.

Those wishing to conduct further research may wish to consult the holdings of the Special Collections at the PTS Library. The PTS Audio Cassette Collection contains an audio recording of Allis, Tape #0514. The Allan Alexander MacRae Manuscript Collection contains five sets of photocopied notes taken in Allis’s lectures at PTS and WTS. The John Gresham Machen and the James Oscar Boyd Manuscript Collections at PTS both contain correspondence with Allis. The Clarence Bouma Collection in the Hekman Library at Calvin University also contains correspondence with Allis. Researchers may also consult the Princeton University Graduate School Records in the Graduate Archives, located in the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library for information about Allis’s A. M. degree.