Day 136, Friday October 18, 2024: Avon, Massachusetts to Medford, Massachusetts
- Mark Carl Rom
- 23 hours ago
- 4 min read
Carnegie libraries visited: Rockland, Massachusetts
Days sober: 484
One more time. Hit the alarm. Squirm into my clothes – should I buy another car before an extensive trip, I’ll get one in which I can sit upright in my sleeping quarters – and pop open the back hatch. Slide out. Walk into the hotel to pee and splash water on my face and, if I remember to bring my toothbrush, scrub my teeth. Click another daily pledge on my I Am Sober app. Read my daily meditation. Check my computer for my itinerary, and enter my first stop into my GPS. Buckle up – always buckle up – and be on my way.
It’s early, and it’s dark, with the sunrise still thirty minutes away. The Rockland Memorial Library is a good place to begin, as it feels as comfortable as my cashmere sweater (I’m not a peasant) and the final one of the 420-odd Carnegie libraries I will have visited. The woman in the (full) moon poses over the library’s shoulders grateful, I believe, to welcome me.
The James Library and Arts Center is not a public library. It is free and open to the public, so I’m including it. It opened in 1874 as a passion project of Reverend William N. Fish. Since its creation it has been used by community groups, with the library listing the Young Ladies Union as the first and the Norwell Women’s Club as one of the current users. The lending library contains books on the first floor and a gallery in the basement. I’ll surely come back when it’s open.
I arrive at Pour Coffee & Bagel Company, mercifully open, while the moon continues to follow me watchfully. My route takes me east to the coast, then out to along a peninsula to Hull. I pause at Nantasket Beach to watch gentle waves rolling. On February 13 I had watched a similar sunrise over the water at Kill Devil Hills on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, wondering how my quest would turn out. Now I know.
The Scituate Town Library. The Hull Public Library. The Hingham Public Library. The Thomas Crane Public Library, which I now recognize as a Richardsonian Romanesque. The Boston Public Library in Jamaica Plain. The Waltham Public Library.
And, finally, the Robbins Library in Arlington. The impressive Italian Renaissance building has a front entrance modelled after the Cancelleria Palace in Rome. Its floors, walls, and fireplaces are of marble. Its arches, columns, and ceilings are accented with gold leaf. Its oak furniture is bespoke. When it was dedicated, the library's trustees said it “is of a style…which will command the admiration of future ages as it does that of all good judges today.”
Nah, that’s not what I really care about, although I do appreciate the fact that this gorgeous library is just down the road a bit from where I’ll be living, and I plan to be there often enough that one of the chairs in the reading room will likely have a “Reserved for Mark” plaque on one of its chairs, not that I would want that because it’s a public library. The Robbins Library is named in honor of Maria Robbins, or her husband Eli, or both. I’d like to think both. Maria gave $150,000 ($5.3 million in 2025) in 1892 to build a library that was designed to hold 60,000 volumes, which would have been a massive collection for a town of 5000 (then; nearly 50,000 today).
Maria was born 1822, the daughter of Elbridge Farmer, and raised in Arlington. In 1845 she married Eli Robbins, a “marketman,” whose brother Nathan was the “wealthiest citizen” in town and the owner of the “finest house.” They had no children. When she died in 1892, her estate was valued at $2 million. A summary of her will shows that, among numerous individual beneficiaries, Maria gave $5,000 to the Graham Society for the Relief of Respectable Aged Indigent Females and $10,000 to the Institution for the Blind in Arlington. She left everything not otherwise distributed to her brother, Elbridge. She had died before the library was completed, and her brother knew that Maria had hoped to endow the library, so he made a $50,000 gift (the Elbridge Farmer Fund) to the library for that purpose. In 1965, Edith M. Fox made a bequest for the expansion of the East Arlington Branch of the Robbins Library, which has been renamed the Fox Branch in her honor. On the library’s 100th birthday, Gordon Russell created the Anna A. Russell Trust Fund, a $500,000 donation in honor of his mother. These gifts, among many others, allowed the library to continue to grow. It’s pretty cool, I think, that two libraries in my neighborhood keep alive the names of the women who were so generous to them.
The Robbins Library is just about a mile from 14 Sagamore Avenue, where I’ll be living with Gretchen and Dick in the coming months. I was not ready to go there just yet, however. My final day on this trip deserved a celebration. I popped over to Brickstone Cafe for a couple of slices for pizza, and then C.J. Scoops for two of the scoops. (Bonus: Scoops is a short walk from Sagamore.) I sat outside, on a warm autumn day, and reflected on my quest while savoring what had become the rare creamy indulgence. Then, without further ado, I hopped in my trusty Goldfinger one final time before I pulled up to the door of my new home.
