Day 86, Thursday, May 30, 2024: Starved Rock Nature Preserve, Illinois to Peoria, Illinois
- Mark Carl Rom
- 7 minutes ago
- 10 min read
Carnegie libraries visited: Galva, Wyoming, Farmington, and Peoria, Illinois
Days sober: 343
I’ve been so lucky on this trip. Not a single morning has it been raining so hard that getting out of Goldfinger was like going down a waterslide. This morning was gorgeous: clear and 49 degrees. Perfect.
Recovery saying for the day, heard at a meeting. “Recovery is like a country song played backward. You’ll get your dog back, your car, and also your one true love.”
My daily itinerary is changing dramatically. Until now, days with 300+ mile drives were routine. From this day forward, they are almost extinct. I’m going to miss the long drives, as they gave me lots of time to listen to books and Razorback baseball, and also to think. On the long days I might be in the car for an hour or two before stopping for a rest or to take a picture. On the shorter days to come my stops will be more frequent, as I travel east and north the towns are much closer together. In the 150 miles I drove today I took pictures of seven libraries, so on average I drove a little over 20 miles between stops.
I’m doing a better job in contacting “promising” libraries in advance to ask them to prepare information for me. I’m glad I did. At the cute Galva Carnegie, I introduced myself to Lauren, the director, and she was ready for me.
Lauren has been the director since 2020. She had big sneakers to fill. Her mother-in-law, Melody, had worked for the library for 47 years, including 27 years as its director, before she retired and Lauren took over. At her retirement, Melody stated ““I only hope that throughout my years here, I have helped to pass on this love I have for a great book.”
“No,” Lauren said, “I’m not Melody’s daughter; I married into the family.” Lauren had a lively personality, sported brown hair with ash highlights, and wore brown glasses and a green t-shirt emblazoned with “Read, Renew, Repeat” in both English and Latin. She was loud, in a good way. A shushing library is not for her. She and her staff chatted and laughed with patrons and delivery people. While we were both going through the archives together, the name Frederick Ulysses Underwood came up time and time again. His name was normally abbreviated: F.U. Underwood. Lauren and I both giggled at this (“Hello, F.U.”). She said “Sometimes I’m so juvenile.” If you don’t get why his initials are hilarious, you are not as juvenile as we.
“Did you grow up in this library?” I asked. No, she only moved to Galva after she got married. “Well, did you participate in summer reading programs when you were a child?” No, she was too busy playing in 3-on-3 basketball tournaments during the summers.
She promised to put me in touch with her mother. Lauren tried several times to reach her this afternoon, with no luck: “She’s probably riding around on her golf cart.” I can’t wait to talk with Melody. The Galva library was the only job she ever had. She worked there as a teenager and then again when she became an adult. She served for years as a librarian, then assistant director, and then finally director for the final twenty four years of her career.
One of Lauren’s staffers had already put together a large folder of material for me to flip through and photograph. It was hugely satisfying to hold original documents while I reviewed them. Online archives are great, and they have proved essential for my research. Still, there is something about holding faded and aging originals…
One of the two small lending libraries in Galva in the late 1800s was in the residence of Mrs. Mary E. Holmes, who was considered a sort of “cultural coordinator” according to the archives, and who once served as the president of the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association. (The character Mrs. Maysworth in George Fitch’s Homeburg Memories, a collection of fictional anecdotes about small town life in the Midwest, is based on Holmes. Fitch calls Maysworth the “ruling spirit of a little bunch of prosperous Homeburg people.”) These libraries were deemed not to be sufficient for the
At the time that Galva applied for a Carnegie grant, in 1908, the town had no library. Town was not exactly booming: its 1870 population was 2160 and in 1910 it had only grown by 300. Randolph Boyd, in his personal capacity, had written to Carnegie a couple of times in 1906, asking how much of a $15,00.00 Carnegie would contribute. (Bertram, misunderstanding, replied that Carnegie would not fund a $1500 library. Better proofread your letter, Boyd.) Bertram did send Boyd an application, and Mrs. P. Larson, the President of the Tuesday Library Club, filled it and returned it to Bertram, while other citizens wrote Bertram, without any apparent coordination. In these letters, the authors mention the Tuesday Club, the Women’s Tuesday Literary Club, and the Ladies Tuesday Club.
Lauren proudly showed me the original letter for Carnegie agreeing to fund the library, addressed to Mrs. Larson. Lauren promised me that she would look further into Mrs. Larson and the Tuesday Club. Unfortunately, the rest of the archival material I reviewed only mentioned the Club in passing. The Tuesday Club was the forerunner of the Woman’s Club of Galva. Lauren suspected that they chose the name ‘The Tuesday Club’ to conceal the fact that it was a woman’s group although the letters to Bertram do not hesitate to mention this. The library opened to the public in 1910.
Jessie Smalley served as the first assistant librarian at the Galva library, where she also served as the children’s librarian. Jessie died tragically of an illness in 1921. In her honor, Jessie’s mother Ada donated $10,000 to the library in 1929, which allowed for an addition to be built which doubled the library’s footprint.
A portrait of Jessie hangs on the addition’s wall. It’s pretty weird. Jessie is sitting on a rope swing while wearing a white lace dress with sleeves that poof out at the elbow. She is wearing a ring on each hand and has a locket dangling from a long necklace. She appears to have auburn hair (although I can’t be sure as the picture is in black and white) with bangs dangling down her forehead and shoulder-length coif otherwise swept up and back. The pose is girlish, yet her attire and – especially – her face suggest that she is much older. I asked my sisters to guess how old she is and, like me, they were baffled.
The library’s archives contained articles from the Galva Standard, and other newspapers, which covered the evolution of the library. A couple of these stories especially caught my attention. I quote it at length, as Ann Larson’s story is not unlike those that could be told by librarians across time and space.
“Six-Year-Old Girl Who Had Found Great Pleasure in Library Reading Club Grows Up To Be Galva Librarian”
The library reading club provided much pleasure for Ann Nelson as a first grader in the Lincoln school, and now, about 30 years later, as Ann Larson, she has returned to Galva Township public library as head librarian.
At the request of Galvaland [a local newsletter?], Ann wrote this account of her dream-come-true:
For a small six-year-old girl who had just learned to read and loved it, the Galva Public Library was a fascinating place indeed. As the school year drew to a close that spring in 1951, our teacher at Lincoln School, Miss Cora Johnson (a great-aunt of assistant librarian, Rebecca Dutyschaver) emphatically reminded us and our parents that very best thing we could do all summer was to read, read, read, so that we wouldn't forget all the beginning skills we had just learned.
Taking her at her word, my mother enrolled me in the summer reading program. We spent a good part of the summer bouncing back and forth to town with piles books by my side and, on the way home, an ice cream cone in my hand ("For heaven's sake, don't drip on the books!") I read every Snipp, Snapp and Snurr book I could (yes, we still have them here), along with so many other books that I won a prize-a large art print of Jack and Jill tumbling down the hill, which hangs in the stairway at home.
Libraries were a little different then, with much emphasis on being quiet, and a short book report required for each summer reading club book read. The pure joy of being able to choose from all those books in the Children's Area (now the Reading Room) more than compensated for any requirement — I was hooked!
I continued reading all through the school year (many times this and other factors led to incomplete and insufficient endeavor in other areas). After graduating from Galva High School in 1962, I attended the Northern Illinois University at DeKalb, married, and had three children. In 1977 I returned to college, this time at Knox, and finished with a degree in education in 1979.
When the children were small, as do so many of us who choose to spend our adult lives in this community where we grew up, I would load them and their books, many times in the red wagon, and we’d make the trek to the library to return and check out books, and the process would begin again. I was fortunate to serve as a trustee of the Galva Township Public Library from 1971 to 1974, a very rewarding learning experience.
Thanks to previous librarians and staff, the Galva Public Library today is considered one of the best, for its size, in the state. We have almost 20,000 volumes, ranging from local history reference books — some 80 years old – to the most current fiction.
Through our affiliation with the Illinois valley Library System headquartered in Pekin, we are literally in touch with almost any library in the world. We have phonograph records, art prints, puzzles, patterns, and book service for the blind and physically handicapped - all available here at the library.
And, if that's not enough, the assistant librarians, Melody Nelson, Rebecca Duytschaver, and Shearon Armel, and summer assistant, Gloria Wilson, represent all that is competent and conscientious in the library profession. Thanks to them, you can get material for your research paper, check out a film to share with your group, or just find the right book to read when you wake up in the middle of the night.
The position of librarian at Galva Township Public one in which creativity and ideas
have few limits, and I feel it a privilege and joy to be here.
In 2010, the Galva Public Library celebrated a century of its leaders, all women. Thanks, librarians.
Miss Blanche Morgan, May 1910-July 1916
Miss Olivia Peterson, July 1916-January 1922
Miss Blanche Morgan, January 1922-February 1926
Mrs. Amy Wiley Houghton, March 1926-December 1933
Mrs. Eva Goodale, December 1933-August 1943
Mrs. Amy Seeley Nelson, August 1943-June 1971
Mrs. Imogene Farquer, July 1971-April 1975
Mrs. Anna Laura Powers, May 1975-November 1980
Mrs. Faith Burdick, November 1980-March 1983
Mrs. Ann Larson, March 1983-August 1994
Mrs. Constance Erieson, August 1994-March 1996
Mrs. Melody Hack, April 1996 - present (as of 2024)
If you drive into Wyoming (Illinois) from the west on state highway 91, as I did, the first sites you’ll encounter are livestock auction on the left and the cemetery on the right. It’s a solid bet that more Wyomingans are buried in the cemetery than currently live there: in 1920, five years after the Carnegie library opened there, the town had a population of 1376, while in 2020 the population was 1300. At its peak, in 1980, Wyoming had only 1614 residents. The town’s main claim to fame is that J. Frank Duryea, the co-inventor with his brother Charles of the first gasoline-powered car in the United States (and the winner of the first American auto-car race) graduated from high school there. That school graduated its final class in 2006, and now Wyoming’s children attend class in nearby Toulon.
When Wyoming applied for a Carnegie grant in 1913, the request from William Sandham noted modestly that the town “was growing slowly” and that “the little city” needed a free public library. It did already have a library of sorts, located in the homes of the president and secretary of the town’s library association. The town’s Tuesday Club had also established a reading room in 1908, although it was open only for one year.
As this was the second Tuesday Club I encountered, I was curious as to their origins and purposes. When I Googled “Tuesday Club” the Wikipedia link that popped up was a reference to the social gatherings of the English Arsenal football club, which consisted of “heavy regular drinking gatherings,” although there are also references to other men’s clubs in colonial America that seemed mainly about boozing. Digging deeper, I found a number of links to Tuesday Clubs for women, such as the club in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, whose purposes were to “educate, enlighten, and promote a sense of community.” As an article on the WBUR website put it, at a club meeting in 2015, the women chanted "Keep us oh God from pettiness, let us be large in thought, in word and in deed; may we put away all pretense and meet each other face to face, without self-pity or prejudice.” As Carole Adams, the club’s second vice president, put it "Those really are the values of this group," she said. "Yeah, that’s pretty old-fashioned, but ain’t it grand. Newfangled isn’t all there is." Tippling was not mentioned.
Speaking of abstinence, Wyoming’s Women's Christian Temperance Union became interested in maintaining a library and in February 1913 the WCTU invited the Tuesday Club, the Ladies League of the Catholic church and, later, the Birthday Club and the Merrymakers' Club to maintain a reading and rest room. In 1913, committees from each club formed the Library Association, which then petitioned the city council for a library maintenance tax. Each club was also asked to pledge money toward the library fund, and they raised over $1000 to support a library through such activities as “a Chautauqua, a concession stand at the fair, and a baseball game between two Wyoming teams, the Fats and the Leans.” Carnegie provided $5600, and the Wyoming Public Library opened in 1915.
Farmington did not have a Tuesday Club, although in many other ways it resembles Wyoming, its neighbor 50 miles to the north. Its population in 2020 was essentially the same as in 1910 (2421 then: 2389 now), and it also reached its peak in 1980 (3118). The Chapman School, which held the town’s first publicly funded library in 1901 (Miss Bessie Clark, the librarian, had a collection of 119 books) has been closed as school districts consolidate. Two years earlier, the town’s Ladies Library Association, together with the Ministerial Association, had opened a reading room with donated reading material. As Farmington agreed to provide a site and $500 annually for the upkeep of the library, Carnegie provided the town $5000 and the library opened in 1907.
Really, alcohol seems to be everywhere. Farmington’s library history states that one of its most notable librarians was “Minta Schoonover, who gave half a century of service. Hired in 1917 as Head Librarian, Miss Schoonover retired in 1967 at the age of 98. She was a conscientious librarian and a good steward of the collection.” When I searched for more information about her, the website for Distinguished Schoonovers pops up…with a picture of Schoonover Whiskey on the cover and, I’ll admit, it looked tasty. Minta’s profile notes that she lived to be 106 (1869-1975) and was said to be the US’s oldest librarian at her retirement. She had no heirs.
I mapped “Farmington public library” and I was surprised when I was directed to the outskirts of town, as Carnegies are almost built at the town’s center. I discovered that the map and I were both right. The library on the outskirts, next to the area’s high school, has replaced the Carnegie, which now serves as God’s Public Library, a religious institution.
