Move over, Pony Express, for the Packhorses!

I think we are all familiar with the book mobile — basically a library on wheels.  But how many of us ever heard of a library on a packhorse?  I just finished reading The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson.  It tells the story of a “book woman,” one of the packhorse librarians who delivered books to remote, craggy areas of the Appalachian Mountains during the Depression on her trusty mule.  It is a story that reminds us how incredibly blessed we are to have access to books!   Online, in our libraries and bookstores, and even, for some, via the bookmobile—we are blessed to be surrounded by books if we choose to be. In “The Book Woman,” the people of Appalachia both embraced and rejected the packhorse librarians, who were likely chosen for not only a love of the written world, but also a passion - and determination - to share.  They fought weather and remote, treacherous terrain to ride up to 120 miles a week to deliver to people living deep in the backwoods of eastern Kentucky, desperate for reading material.  They sometimes encountered steep mountain paths where their horses and mules struggled to stay upright.  In some areas, they had to splash along riverbeds and iced-over creeks because there were no roads.  While most families embraced the librarians, some initially resisted them out of suspicion of outsiders.  In the “Bookwoman,” which is a fictionalized story based on real life events, the main character faced sexual harassment and abuse at the hands of backwoods predators. 

But the program, established in 1935 by the New Deal’s Work Progress Administration, persevered.  Imagine the reaction of children to a pack course librarian as they envisioned what she had packed in her saddlebag for them!  Text books, recipes and quilt patterns were circulated among the mountain families, too. In 1936, packhorse librarians served 50,000 families and, by 1937, 155 schools.  

Books and magazines for the packhorse library were acquired largely from donations; great pains were taken to preserve them.  When they became too worn, librarians pasted the text and images from the worn books into binders.  Many of the families served had never checked out a book before the Pack Horse Library program.  In 1935, Kentucky’s circulation book per capita was just one—only a fraction of the American Library Association standard back then of five to ten.  Some 30 percent of Eastern Kentuckians were illiterate in 1930. The Pack Horse Library - which employed nearly 1,000 riding librarians in total, ended in 1943 after Franklin Roosevelt ordered the end of the WPA.  Bookmobiles weren’t introduced in the area until the 1950s.  Imagine the families of Appalachia once the brave Packhorse Librarians no longer served them.  Imagine yourself with no access to books! 

So celebrate your local library!  And come to the Alfred Dickey Library in Jamestown this Saturday, Nov. 16 from 12-3 pm.  Ozzy Ox and I will be there for its first-ever Local Author Fair!