Packhorse Librarians

Who doesn’t love a library? Well, some people for sure, but for me libraries have always been a sanctuary, a quiet place to read, research, and think. Surrounded by thousands of books and even more like church than, well, church. Before Google there were card catalogs, and you learned how to use them. It was the only way to get the job, the learning, the reading, done. If a person was interested in that sort of thing.

During the Great Depression, one of the more unique projects of Roosevelt’s New Deal were the packhorse librarians, as they came to be known. Started in eastern Kentucky, these librarians carried books to the remote poor farming and coal mining families of the Appalachian mountains. The work was tough and was done mainly by women, traveling by horse or mule with their load of books. Because of the 60% unemployment rate in eastern Kentucky, women were often the only breadwinners in families hobbled by poverty.

Sometimes there were no roads, and the women would ride dry creek beds, animal trails, or fence lines to get to their destinations and deliver the precious books. If saddlebags weren’t available, books were carried in old pillowcases. If a librarian didn’t have a horse or a mule, one could be rented from a local farmer for fifty cents a week. But that came out of her pay, a dollar a day. One librarian’s mule died, and she walked her route all winter until she could afford another.

By far the most popular title was The Bible, followed by Alice in Wonderland, Treasure Island, and The Adventures of Robin Hood. But it wasn’t just books. Periodicals were also popular, National Geographic, Popular Mechanics, and even fashion magazines. Everyone, I think, aspires to something more, and even if a woman in the remote mountains of Kentucky could never afford it, just knowing what was being worn in New York and Paris was a thing of interest. And why not.

Regardless of income levels, social strata, or geography, every parent wants more for their children than they had. Parents in the hills of Appalachia, though often illiterate themselves, welcomed the librarians. They knew their children needed what books taught you, the code to the gateway of literacy, and the key to the door of a better life. 

Under the pressures of World War II, the program was ended in 1943. But by then the packhorse librarians had circulated more than sixty thousand books among ten thousand families. How many children’s and adult’s lives were changed by these books is impossible to say, but it had to be plenty. That’s the power of books, to fire imaginations, educate, and instigate change. 

As a child I always felt safe in a library, and something about the vast shelves of books stretching down the aisles just made me feel better about everything. Like there was no limit to what I could know, if I could just find the right book. It was all there, waiting on the pages. 

These days we generally take libraries for granted. And librarians, and teachers. But here’s a toast to the packhorse librarians, and the bookmobiles, libraries and educators that followed. All the lives that have been changed and enriched. And whether we get our reading between the bindings of a paperback or on the screen of a computer, here’s to books.