Day 61, Sunday April 28, 2024: Chadron, South Dakota to Gothenburg, Nebraska
- Mark Carl Rom
- Apr 28
- 4 min read
Carnegie libraries visited: Albion and Arcadia, Nebraska.
It’s a long and not winding road today. The 330 miles of highways I take between Chadron and Albion are racetrack flat. For better or worse, Goldfinger is no racer; it whines like my mother’s old egg beater when I accelerate to 75 MPH. The longest break I took before I arrived in Albion was to pull into a drive before a locked gate for a thirty minute Zoom call with my family. I could see no houses anywhere in the 330 miles and only a few cars roared and a couple of trucks rumbled down the road during the call.
My family holds weekly Zoom calls every Sunday, minus only a couple, since the Covid pandemic began in 2020. Before then, the family rarely got together. I’ll need to ask my sisters – they are the holders of family knowledge – because the last time I remember my “core” family (father, two sisters, brother) getting together was at my wedding in 2017. Like any family reunion, these Zoom calls are full of news of the day and memories of the past.
Today, my father ‘Ace’ asked me “Did you drive through Madison (South Dakota) on your trip?” No, why? Ace explained that his great grandfather had homesteaded near Madison in the 1870s. When my father was a child, his grandfather told him that he had seen the US 7th Cavalry – General George Armstrong Custer’s – ride through the streets.
As the miles roll by, I’m engrossed in Ann Patchett’s enchanting novel Tom Lake, narrated by Meryl Streep. Midway through, a scene unfolds:
No sooner had the curtain come down that he [Uncle Wallace, playing the role of the Stage Manager in the play Our Town] pitched into my lap, bringing up an endless convulsion of blood. Blood poured from his mouth and pooled in the white fabric of my white wedding dress, spreading, soaking. I had no idea how a man could lose so much blood and still be alive.
Lara, the narrator of the book who plays Emily in Our Town, is filled with remorse for not doing anything earlier that night to save Uncle Wallace. Her fellow actor/lover Paul Duke (“Duke”) tries to console her:
He didn’t start vomiting blood because you spent an extra twenty minutes onstage because he didn’t feel well. He started vomiting blood because he’s an unrepentant drunk for his entire adult life…Nothing against Uncle Wallace. Nothing at all. But he was teaching you a lesson you’d be wise to learn: you can’t save them that won’t save themselves.”
As Lara and Duke pack up Uncle Wallace’s cottage – it’s obvious that he is not going to be able to finish the play’s run – they find that Wallace’s “freezer was full of vodka, proud Russian soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder beside the ice maker.” Uncle Wallace, unable to stop drinking even after this bleeding episode, dies a few months later at age 56. Duke, the actor who is soon to become a huge star, develops his own drinking habit and ends up in a rehab/mental hospital. He ultimately drowns – I’m guessing while drunk – after falling off his sailboat off the island of Capri. My grandfather died in a similar way, but not at Capri, and not off a boat. Duke was 60.
Welcome to The Land of the Libraries! I’ve driven through several library deserts, either because the land was sparsely populated (say, Wyoming) or because its residents chose not to build them (as in much of the South). Sixty-nine Carnegie libraries were built in Nebraska, although only 18 still serve that purpose today. Iit seems as if every town, no matter how small, had one. Ainsworth, 1616 (all population numbers come from the 2020 census). Bassett, 538. Stuart, 590. Atkinson, 1306. Clearwater, 320. Neligh, 1536. Elgin, 717. Albion, 1699. Cedar Rapids, 382. Scotia, 301. Arcadia, 283. Callaway, 563. Gothenburg, 3478. Valentine, 2633. It is true that many of these towns were on the rise a century ago, but not dramatically so (for example, at its peak Elgin had 917 residents in 1930). At the time that their libraries were built, the two Carnegie towns (Albion and Arcadia) had a mere 1584 and 618 residents, respectively. Before the day is over, I’ll have taken pictures of libraries in 19 towns, none of them bigger than Grover Corner in Our Town or Gopher Prairie in Main Street.
Albion’s library history didn’t interest me. It would have, if I had found something interesting about it. The town itself isn’t known for that much – the history on its Wikipedia page runs five short sentences, two of them describing how the town’s name was chosen through a wager in a game of euchre. Yet from small towns can come great names. Albion was the birthplace of Viola Florence Barnes, who became one of the most prominent female historians of the first half of the 20th century in the US while she was teaching at Mt. Holyoke College.
South of Albion the landscaped changes. What had been an unending plain turned into great rolling mounds, rising like a pod of dolphins out of the earth. Small towns came more frequently. The highway remained empty.
The Arcadia Ladies Up-to-Date Club were the instigators of that town’s Carnegie. Yes, Mrs. Jess Ward wrote Bertram to say “Our woman’s club is instigating a movement to establish a township library in our village.” Bertram’s response: have the mayor and the town council write to me. When the town clerk did write Bertram, he noted that the Up-to-Date Club had “by various means” raised enough money to buy a site for the library and to buy 400 or 500 books. When the clerk later writes Bertram asking what the town is to do, Bertram replies with his usual cheer “Your favor of April 7th received, asking what we wish you to do. What to do is very plainly indicated [in my previous letter].” The library opened in 1917 with Mrs. Percy Doe as its librarian.
The sun had set when I pulled into Gothenburg at 9 pm. Its library glowed in the twilight, resting after a quiet Sunday, ready for the readers sure to come the next day.
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