Day 78, Monday May 20, 2024: Bayfield, Wisconsin to Preston, Minnesota

Carnegie libraries visited: Northfield, Chatfield, and Preston, Minnesota

Rain foiled my plans. I was hoping to take the ferry out to Madeline Island and the steady drizzle made that unattractive. The parking lot was beginning to hop by sunrise. I popped out of the back hatch, like it was the most natural thing for a guy to do first thing in the morning, and then drove south west all day, angling across Wisconsin on my back towards Minneapolis. I stopped every few miles to take a picture of a library (Bayfield, Washburn, Cable, and Hayward) before taking a coffee break at Alley Cats in Spooner, Wisconsin.

Bayfield Carnegie Library

Washburn Public Library

Cable Public Library

Spooner Public Library

Spooner, the band, was formed in Madison, Wisconsin in the early 1970s. Whether or not the band was named after the town – I know the reverse can’t be true – it was one of my favorite bands when I was in graduate school. Its drummer, Butch Vig, went on to be a famous producer (Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins) and also to form another band I adore, Garbage. These are the things I think about when driving through miles of forest and farmland, or that I am compelled to look up while I’m at Alley Cats.

Northfield, Minnesota received a Carnegie grant in 1910 after, if not because, town officials informed Carnegie that it had an “unusually intelligent population” and that the town itself was “exceptionally enterprising.” After all, Northfield does lie within the state “where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average,” as Garrison Keillor put it.

Northfield Carnegie Library

Librarians are universally against book bans, and Northfield’s library exemplifies this. Librarians believe that their libraries should be free and open to all and that they should provide a wide variety of books to serve their various community needs and preferences. Politics, of course, is what mucks things up. PEN America, a non-profit dedicated to free expression, reported that in between 2021 and 2023 forty-two states hand book bans in place, and that there were some 4000 school book bans in the first six months of 2024, more than double during the same time the previous year. In many places – in general, the most conservative communities –  librarians are under tremendous pressure from those who seek to ban books. 

In more liberal areas, libraries actually celebrate banned books. The wonderful Carnegie library in Northfield has preserved the historic library while adding a glass jewel-box addition. In the lobby a large poster is prominently displayed: Which banned books have you read?

I’ve listened to a couple of the books on that list while on this trip: Not All Boys are Blue; This Book is Gay; and The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I can see why some parents definitely don't like them. Not All Boys and This Book are about, well, gays. This Book is a user’s manual to being gay; Not All Boys is a memoir of what it’s like to grow up Black and gay. Perks, which I haven’t finished, is a series of (fictional) letters written by a teenage boy to an unnamed friend. The boy is introspective and observant (hence, the wallflower moniker). It contains all the elements that some parents don’t want their teenagers to know about: sex, homosexuality, masturbation, sexual violence, alcohol, LSD, pot, abortion…the list goes on. The boy does not glamorize any of these, and confronts them as I believe any wallflower would. I would have recommended any of these books to my sons when they were teenagers; that’s just me. As my son Chris puts it, “Don’t these parents know their kids have phones on which porn and everything else parents fear are available 24 hours a day?” As a teenager in Arkansas in the 1970s, I can assure you that none of these topics were unknown to me in real life.

I reflected on what life might be like if one only had access to books that showed one way of living, and one type of character. These matters were on my mind as I veered to the southeast through Pine Island, Chatfield, and Preston. A sign outside the Chatfield library informed me that  

The library building originally housed a public restroom for women on the basement level. This was considered a noteworthy public amenity in early twentieth-century America. Literally a place for women to rest, the room included a small parlor attached to a toilet stall, where women who ventured into public for extended periods-when visiting the library, for example, or coming into town to shop could avail themselves of a private, safe, gender-segregated space of their own.

Libraries serve the public in many ways that might not be widely appreciated, except for those who do. 

Chatfield Carnegie Library

Emma Allen Mills was the person most responsible for bringing a library to Preston when she formed the Preston Browning Round Table in 1898. Its members “deplored the fact that Preston had no public library where information…might be gained.” The members assessed themselves $1 each to purchase books for a library. In 1905 the Club’s Secretary, Mrs. O.H. Larson wrote Carnegie and, without extolling the virtues of the community, simply asked what they needed to do to obtain a Carnegie grant. The more boastful letters from town officials followed, if only three years later after “[t]he ladies of the Browning Club attended a village council meeting ‘en masse’ and offered their 327 book collection if the council would levy a tax for library support.” The council agreed, and the Preston Browning Public Library was opened in the Fillmore County Bank.  Miss Florence Kiehle was hired as the first librarian at $8.00 a month.

In 1909, the town – prodded by the Browning Round Table – applied for a Carnegie grant after the usual back and forth (which “must have languished except for [the Library Board’s] efforts and those of the Browning Club,” its new library opened in 1912. Much more information about the formation of this library, and Emma Mills work to build one, can be found in the MA thesis “A Library for Preston: The Browning Club and Mr. Carnegie,” submitted by Patricia Ann Schafer to the University of California, Los Angeles in 1990, if only I could get my hands on it.

Preston Carnegie Library