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C h a p t e r t wo A Credit to the Place The Sage Public Library of Osage, Iowa O n January 9, 1871, seven prominent men of Osage, Iowa, gathered at the Center School House “to establish a Library of general reading matter suitable for persons of all occupations and professions.” To raise money, members pledged that capital stock should “not be less than 100 shares nor more than 500 shares of $5.00 each.” An executive committee was charged to select books and magazine subscriptions , and to select a librarian to care for and catalog the collection. Each shareholder had a vote and could draw one item from the collection for every share he owned.1 Charter members of the Osage Library Association (OLA) resembled their counterparts in Sauk Centre, Minnesota. Most had emigrated to Mitchell County, Iowa, from the East to set up banks, practice professions, manage schools, or establish businesses essential to rural populations. Osage was settled largely by families “of the calculating and conservative character,” the Osage News noted. OLA board members came from this group. All were Protestant men, and most were Republican, with many Civil War veterans and GAR members.2 On May 27, 1872, the Osage city council appointed a committee of “old settlers” to meet “on his arrival” Orrin Sage, a wealthy Ware, Massachusetts , banker who five years earlier donated a bell for Osage’s Congregational church.3 In 1856 Sage had worked through Iowa agents to purchase a Mitchell County plat. “Old settlers” agreed to name the town Osage, after Sage, and on April 14 voted to make Osage the county seat. Within three years all the land in the plat was sold. In 1856 Osage boasted a population near fifteen hundred. In 1869 the Illinois Central Railroad connected Osage to the outside world. A year later, a Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) chapter formed the First Congregational Church; about the 48 • a credit to the place same time Hamlin Garland’s family moved there when his father became elevator manager for a local Grange organization.4 It is not known what transpired at the 1872 meeting between Sage and the “old settlers,” but subsequent events suggest that several OLA leaders discussed a lack of good books in town and suitable space for a library. In his autobiographical Son of the Middle Border, Hamlin Garland noted that McGuffey Readers he used “were almost the only counterchecks” to sensational novels, but that as a lad he regularly traded scores of “Beadle’s Dime Novels” and borrowed twenty-five to thirty numbers of the Seaside Library series from a harvest hand his father hired. “The pleasure I took in these tales should fill me with shame, but it doesn’t—I rejoice in the memory of it.”5 The OLA had none of these novels. Perhaps that explains why it sold only eight shares in two years. To generate more revenue it allowed non-shareholders to use the collection “by depositing with the Librarian the retail price of the books they wish together with fifteen cents for reading of the same.” Better news came in June 1873, however, when Orrin Sage wrote to the Osage city council that he was prepared to deed the city 669 acres he owned in Missouri if Osage agreed to establish a “Public Library” to increase “the intelligence” and address “the moral and religious welfare” of “all Osage inhabitants.“6 Although town fathers welcomed the offer, they could not act immediately. First they had to find a site, which they hoped sales of the Missouri property would cover. In the interim the OLA continued to struggle. But Sage proved impatient. “Have you ever made an estimate of the building which you propose to put up for a Library?,” he wrote in December. “I may be disposed [to help],” he said. In January 1874 the mayor of Osage appointed a committee to find a site. A month later the committee recommended a two-story building; the “Sage Public Library” would be located on the second floor, and the first would be rented to generate library revenue. On March 11, Sage offered $2,500 to help purchase the property. The city council happily accepted, then authorized a special election to discern “the expediency of forming and maintaining a free public library.” The vote was sixty-five for, four against. (Women, children, and propertyless men could not vote.) As a result, the Sage became the second tax...

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