Day 39, Saturday March 23, 2024: Coos Bay, Oregon to Portland, Oregon

Carnegie libraries visited: Albany, McMinnville, Newberg, Woodburn, Oregon City, all in Oregon

Coos Bay Orego

The parking lot at the Coos Bay Harbor makes a solid place to spend the night, and overnighting there is legal. Some iOverlanders report being put off by the clientele (“full ghetto vibes”). It seems to be heavily used by the homeless later in the season, which draws some complaints and responses like “YES there’s homeless people but where else are they supposed to go? Don’t be classist - respect their space and they’ll respect yours.” It’s quiet, and wet, when I roll out in the morning.

Today was a day to drive and observe. Between 7.30 and 4.30 I stopped at sixteen libraries to take pictures, and I didn’t enter any of them. I drove north along the majestic Oregon coast between Coos Bay and Newport before swinging east to Corvallis and then north again to Portland.

I plan my daily route by identifying the Carnegie libraries I plan to visit and then drawing the most interesting route to hit them. Mapping apps (Google, Waze) assume that you will want to make the drive as quickly as possible, often via Interstate, so to fool those programs I add small towns on the itinerary I want. 

This was one of those days. Because my final destination is Portland, and the Carnegies I’ll visit on the way are close to that city, Google wants to send me east to Interstate 5 most expeditiously. I want to travel as close to the Pacific as possible, so I add Reedsport, Florence, Yachats, and Newport to keep me on the coastal highway, US 101, for a hundred splendid miles. The weather was misty, the road was virtually deserted, and as I drove through the Siuslaw National Forest I had many, yet not enough, chances to watch the waves slash against the rocks.

I had traveled once along the Oregon coast, hitching from north to south as I was completing my Arkansas to Winnipeg, Canada, and then along the trans-Canada highway to Vancouver, before slouching down the west coast to meet my friend Kelly in Palo Alto. The Oregon coast was even more exquisite than I remembered, especially as my memories of that 44 year ago trip had faded. The memories had faded; my wonder had not. The libraries I visited that were not Carnegies seemed to nestle in their towns with architecture befitting their location. 

Albany, Oregon, had a bumpy and winding road to obtaining a Carnegie library. Beginning in 1903, various local citizens and officials began writing to Carnegie in an apparently uncoordinated campaign to get library funding. In 1905, a Mrs. Ellen Ranck wrote

My Dear Mr. Carnegie,

Some time ago I wrote you asking your kindly consideration of a library for Albany. Since then, I have learned on good authority that citizens of this town are too conservative – too dead to the evil that menaces the youth of our town to even give a site for a building, let alone the building itself, so we are bookstarved here…

Several chatty pages follow before Ranck asks for assistance. In trying to decipher her handwriting, I kept thinking “get to the point, already. Brevity, Ellen.” Bertram, in response, is brief: “If Albany has not a library building and desires one, the authorities should communicate with Mr. Carnegie if they are desirous of his assistance in procuring a library building.” In 1906, Mr. Wallace Lee, a pastor at the First Presbyterian Church, submitted a form to Carnegie which noted that although there was no public library the town’s residents could use the college library. The archives do not show a response. 

In 1907, Sarah Adams, the President of the women’s Modern Travelers Club in Albany, appointed a committee to make a library on their own. Her team, led by Viola Franklin, found a small brick building on Second and Ferry to house the books they collected, and over the next few years the Club accumulated some 1500 volumes. Then, on March 22, 1910, Viola penned a letter to Mr. Carnegie.

Two notes regarding my use of the Carnegie archives.

Much of the correspondence regarding the establishment of the Carnegie libraries has been digitized and is accessible through the Columbia University Libraries. Much of the correspondence is also virtually illegible, unfortunately. For reasons lost to history, many of the original manuscripts were typed over by monkeys given keyboards who sometimes hit the right keys and often did not. It is possible for me to read some of these texts only with great difficulty, if at all. When I inquired, the Columbia librarian told me that she had no idea why the documents were handled this way yet, because the over-typing had happened years ago, there was nothing we could do about it.

Second, many of the letters were written in longhand. In my imagination, the kinds of women that would have written Carnegie would have done so in elegant script. Hardly. Signatures are frequently difficult to read, as I expected, as they are more likely to illustrate the personality of the author than to facilitate legibility to the reader. Yet the text itself often appears to have been written while wearing mittens and riding a stagecoach over rip-rap roads. I tip my hat to those who read archival letters for a living. I found doing so difficult, tedious, and frustrating. 

All right, a third note. Thank you, Carnegie archives and archivists.

Viola outlines the library work that the Travelers Club is doing and appeals to Carnegie’s generosity. Other letters of support follow from the Oregon Library Commission and the Albany Commercial Club. Viola follows up asking whether her earlier letter was received, and she announces that a site for the library was donated by Mrs. S.E. Young, on the property which held the first home that she and her husband had bought in 1871. As the Albany newspaper put it, Mrs. Young 

is one of those plain, noble ladies, devoid of that ostentation all too common in these later days, and the gift of this site for a public library was without formality or pomp; with soul [sic] and only wish that it be properly improved and thereby become of practical use to the public.

Days before the library opened in 1914, Mrs. Young brought the first book – a Holy Bible – through its doors. Volunteers packed up and hauled over the 3200 books from the old library.

If only every library was as aware of keeping historical records as the Albany Carnegie was. On May 14, 1914, shortly before the library opened, Mrs. Viola Franklin again wrote Bertram: 

During the month of Dec. 1910, or thereabouts, you sent a letter to me stating that Mr. Carnegie would give a public library to Albany, on certain conditions. Will you be kind enough to send me a copy of that letter? Mine has been lost and I need it for historical purposes very much…Enclosed find a stamped envelope for reply.

Impatiently, she sent a follow-up letter to Bertram two weeks later. Bertram, as always attentive to details, sent Franklin a summary of their correspondence and reminded her that the “first promise” of a library “in any shape or form” was sent to her on April 11, 1911.

By day’s end, I had stopped by sixteen libraries. Several of them – the libraries in Lakeside (population 1904 in 2020), Yachats (pop. 994, and home to the annual Yachats La De Da Parade, Music Festival, Mushroom Festival, and Celtic Festival), Amity (pop. 1757)– were small  libraries in little towns. So add one more item to my growing library interests. I’ve created a photo folder with the label “America’s Tiny Libraries” with the goal of producing a photobook of these gems.