Main Street Public Library: Community Places and Reading Spaces in the Rural Heartland, 1876-956

Introduction: Information, Reading, Place

I n t roduc t ion Information, Reading, Place A s of this writing, the United States has more public libraries than McDonald’s restaurants. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, two-thirds of Americans annually visited a public library at least once, and two of three were registered borrowers. These statistics state the obvious. The American public library is a heavily used and ubiquitous institution, and because 80 percent of public library systems serve towns with populations less than twenty-five thousand, this is especially true in small-town America. Rare is the small town without a public library, an institution that since the late nineteenth century has become the model other countries seek to emulate. In the twentieth century alone, thousands of small public libraries served as particular destinations, and have circulated billions of books to citizens young and old, rich and poor, male and female, black, red, white, yellow, and brown. With few exceptions ,1 however, we know little about the overall history of the small-town public library. Main Street Public Library attempts to address this deficiency. Chronologically , the study covers from 1876, when the federal government published its first report on U.S. public libraries, to 1956, with the enactment of the Library Services Act, which for the first time provided federal funds for public library services through state library agencies. Geographically, it focuses on public libraries in four small Midwest communities: the Bryant Library in Sauk Centre, located in central Minnesota amid rolling prairies, diversified groves of hardwoods, and hundreds of lakes; the Sage Public Library in Osage, situated in northeast Iowa amid agriculturally productive and predominantly rural prairie land; the Charles H. Moore Library in Lexington, Michigan, nestled on the shores of Lake Huron seventy miles north of Detroit, where, like so many of the state’s communities, 2 • introduction its character was shaped by water; and the Rhinelander Public Library in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, located in Wisconsin’s Northern Highland region where tourism and the wood product industry sustained the local economy —and where, unlike the other three, the community supported labor unions and fostered a strong distrust of state control. All four communities owe their origins to emigrant largely Republican Protestant Yankees who crafted commercial, social, educational, religious, and cultural institutions in the mid-nineteenth century. During the eighty years covered in this book, none of the four communities possessed great wealth or great poverty; instead they were home to tidy, stable, and largely homogeneous populations that shared cultural values and an ethic of hard work. Their public libraries reflected these values.2 Readers may recognize the name Sauk Centre; Sinclair Lewis was born andraisedthere,andmanyhavearguedthatitisthemodelforGopherPrairie , whose small-town values he excoriated in Main Street (1920). Lewis’s novel follows the experiences of Carol Kennikott, a college-educated librarian from St. Paul who had recently moved to Gopher Prairie after marrying the town doctor. Because of his position, she joined the town’s leading families. But her attempts to bring big-city ideas to small-town people always ended in disaster. Lewis does give Gopher Prairie a public library, “housed in an old dwelling, sufficient but unattractive.” When she visited the library “Carol caught herself picturing pleasanter readingrooms , chairs for children, an art collection, a librarian young enough to experiment.” Lewis makes his Main Street librarian an unhappy female disgruntled at not being accepted by the leading women’s club (to which Carol, of course, belonged): “If they prefer to have papers on literature by other ladies who have no literary training—after all, why should I complain ,” the librarian tells Carol. As the librarian talks, Carol notices that she has “emphatically stamped a date in the front of ‘Frank on the Lower Mississippi’ for a small flaxen boy” and “glowered at him as though she were stamping a warning on his brain.”3 To what extent did the Main Street public library Lewis described accurately represent the people who supported and used this civic institution in the first half of the twentieth century? Published local histories of these four communities show that each was proud and very loyal to its public library, but none offer obviously unusual or colorful stories. All the libraries , in fact, seemed typical, two situated on Main Street, two just off Main information, reading, place • 3 Street. Three of them were housed in early-twentieth-century buildings whose construction was funded by...