The Packsaddle Librarians of Eastern Kentucky by Jo-Ann Roberts

 

Recently, I watched a PBS documentary about the Pack Horse Library, a Works Progress Administration (WPA) program that delivered reading material the people who lived in the craggy, 10,000-square-mile portion of eastern Kentucky during the Great Depression. 

As I watched, I wondered if Dolly Parton was inspired to start her Imagination Library by these intrepid, innovative women!

Kentucky already trailed its neighbors in electricity and highways. And during the Depression food, education and economic opportunities were even scarcer for Appalachians.

And they also lacked books.

In the early 1930s, up to 31% of people in eastern Kentucky couldn't read. Though they wanted to learn, coal and railroads were poised to industrialize the region, raising the hopes of many Appalachians who were ready to take part in the coming prosperity.

"Workers viewed the sudden economic changes as a threat to their survival and literacy as a means of escape from a vicious economic trap." Donald C. Boyd.

This presented a challenge. In 1930, Kentucky only circulated one book per capita compared to the standard of five to ten. There had been earlier attempts to get books into the remote region. In 1913, a Kentuckian named May Stafford solicited money to take books to rural people on horseback, but her project only lasted one year. Local Berea College sent a horse-drawn book wagon into the mountains in the last teens and early 1920s. But that program ended by 1934, when the first WPA-sponsored packhorse library was formed in Leslie County.

Unlike many New Deal projects, the packhorse plan required help from locals. "Libraries" were housed in any facility that would step up, from churches to post offices. Librarians manned these outposts, giving books to carriers who then climbed aboard their mules or horses, saddlebags loaded with books and headed into the hills. They took their jobs as seriously as mail carriers and crossed streams in wintry conditions, feet frozen in the stirrups.

Librarians were paid $28 a month ($495 in today's dollars) to deliver books to the people, provided their own horses, or leased them from neighbors, using saddlebags, sacks, and pillowcases to carry books to people who had no way to get to libraries. These hardy women rode out at least twice a month, covering 100 to 120 miles a week to deliver books that were donated from women's clubs, schools, churches, and universities.

One librarian, Nan Milan, who carried books in an eight-mile radius from the Pine Mountain Settlement School, joked that the horses she rode had shorter legs on one side than the other so that they wouldn't slide off the steep mountain paths.

The librarian solicited donations of books, magazines, textbooks, Sunday school material, and newspapers from people in more affluent and accessible regions. Once the precious books were in a library's collection, the women did everything they could to preserve them. They repaired books, repurposing old Christmas cards as bookmarks so people would be less likely to dog-ear pages.

 As word of the campaign spread, books arrived from other states. A Kentuckian who had moved to California sent 500 books as a memorial to his mother. When materials became too worn to circulate, librarians made them into new books. They pasted stories and pictures from the worn books into binder, turning them into new reading material. Recipes, also pasted into binders and circulated throughout the mountains, proved so popular that Kentuckians started scrapbooks of quilt patterns, too.

In 1936, packhorse librarians served 50,000 families, and by 1937, 155 public schools. Children loved the program, and since they were so far from public libraries, most students had never checked out a book.

"'Bring me a book to read,' is the cry of every child as he runs to meet the librarian with whom he has become acquainted...not a certain book, but any kind of book." Pack Horse Library supervisor.

The Pack Horse Library Project also provided reading lessons. 

Librarians and book women would also read aloud to families. The librarians were also seen as educators, bringing new ideas into isolated areas. In order to do so, librarians had to deal with their community's suspicion of strangers and deal with a "hostility toward any outside influence". Librarians managed to overcome the attitude to such a degree that one family was reported as refusing to move to a new county because it lacked a packhorse library service.

The project ended in 1943 when the WPA stopped funding the program. While local communities tried to keep the libraries going, they were unable to continue without funding. It was only in the 1950s that the remote communities would have access to bookmobiles.

The women who participated in the project and the communities they served, had been forever changed by the simple, powerful act of bringing books and knowledge to those who need it most.

If you are interested, here is the link to watch the PBS documentary.

 The Pack Horse Librarians of Appalachia | Episode 1 | PBS