



This past weekend, I visited the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College. Wheaton, located right outside of Chicago, is the country’s flagship Evangelical university. It’s the school Billy Graham attended and brought to fame. But the Wade Center, hidden in a plain neighborhood, on outskirts of the campus, has become a pilgrimage site for Protestants and Catholics alike.

In the 1950s, Dr. Clyde S. Kilby, an English professor at Wheaton College, began a correspondence with Lewis. They eventually met and became friends, and after Lewis’s death, Kilby began “The C.S. Lewis Collection” to honor the great writer’s legacy.

It included manuscripts, letters, and artifacts belonging to Lewis, and over the years, the collection expanded to include items from Lewis’s Inkling friends, and then from other people who influenced them. The resulting group included seven British authors: Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton, Owen Barfield, George MacDonald, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Charles Williams.

In 1974, friends and family of Marion E. Wade, a local businessman and himself a C.S. Lewis aficionado, established an endowment to support the collection, which was then renamed “The Marion E. Wade Collection.”

For years, the collection moved between various buildings on Wheaton’s campus, but then in 2001, it found a permanent home in the newly constructed Wade Center. Built out of limestone and fashioned after an English manor house, the facility is a haven for Inkling scholars and fans of Narnia and Middle Earth. Perhaps its biggest claim to fame is that it features C.S. Lewis’s famed wardrobe, the one which likely inspired his Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Walking through the Wade Center museum and library was an incredible treat for this Inkling devotee. Here were some of the highlights:















































































































































