In 1966 UT Medical Center appealed to the community to equip and establish its fledgling medical library. The Hamilton National Bank made the necessary gift and named the library for its board chairman, Howard Payne Preston (1884–1968), who attended UT from 1900 to 1902.
A native of Woodbury, Tennessee, Preston was vice president of Bank of America National Association at San Francisco in 1928–29 and then moved to its New York office. He went to Chicago in 1932 to manage the Chicago office of the Reconstruction Finance Office. In 1933 he was deputy governor of the Chicago Federal Reserve, and from 1936 to 1945 he was first vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank.
In 1945 he came to Knoxville to succeed his brother, Charles Miller (C. M.) Preston, as president of the Hamilton National Bank. He served as president from 1945 to 1960, when he became board chairman, remaining in that capacity until his death.
He was the first president of UT’s Development Council, a body upon which he served from 1955 to 1963. The bank’s gift provided the furnishings for the 3,500-square-foot library on the first floor of the research center wing of UT Medical Center and also provided furnishings for a conference room and offices. The library was dedicated on January 5, 1967.