On a summer day one hundred years ago, a line of children from the Center School/Town Hall building in Hampton ferried the town’s library from its old quarters to the handsome Italianate Victorian at 257 Main Street where town librarian Kate Thompson was waiting for them, ready to paste in the new library slips and fill the shelves.
Although Hampton had a library of one sort or another since 1865, the collection had been stored over the years in volunteers’ homes or kept in locked wooden cabinets opened once a week for borrowers. A proper library building had been the dream of an earlier town librarian, Eliza Durkee, who willed her home for that purpose. Her nephew and executor, Austin Fletcher, decided a larger building would suit better. He purchased the present building as a memorial to her and to his mother, Harriet Durkee Fletcher, and created the Austin Fletcher Trust Fund to finance the library.
Although Austin Fletcher had been concerned to provide a large enough facility, for many years the library used only the three main floor rooms These housed a modest collection, still largely preserved in the History Room upstairs.
The small size of the library holdings was not surprising. The population of the town in 1920 was 475, with summer people adding maybe twenty families. The Crash of ’29, the Great Depression and World War II all meant that there were many calls on town funds and community donations besides the library.
Despite its endowment, Fletcher Memorial library was clearly never an affluent institution. In 1961, the library board came up with an ingenious solution to their slender budget. They hired 52 year old Eunice Fuller to be the unpaid librarian in exchange for housing in the unused portion of the building. The contract required her to keep up the building, mow the lawn and shovel the walks, outrageous demands today but not unlike contemporary expectations for young public school teachers.
What no one anticipated was that Eunice would serve the town more than 38 years, as probate judge and Republican registrar of voters as well as librarian, retiring at 90. Unpaid at the library until her final years, she became one of the town’s great characters: an independent, opinionated, practical book lover with a warm heart under a crusty exterior. She ran the library her way, disapproving of book fines and locked library doors. Hampton residents were welcome at all hours to visit, relax, and gossip with friends. She was remarkable for her knowledge of readers’ tastes, her resistance to modernization, and her many kindnesses. A skilled gardener, Eunice favored daylilies, some still thriving in the memorial garden on the north side of the building. She was devoted to the Boston Red Sox and setter dogs and for years a flock of elderly hens that never had to fear the stewpot.
When Eunice retired, ill with skin cancer, the library board appointed Louise Oliver, almost certainly the first Hampton librarian to be professionally educated in library science, to the still unpaid position. While willing to volunteer, Louise insisted on being paid $1 every year to stress that librarians should be compensated. This point was made very firmly some years later after Louise fell ill with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Gloria Langer temporarily stepped in as an unpaid librarian, but she convinced the board that the job must now be compensated. With some financial help from the town, Linda Gorman was hired as the first paid librarian in 2005.
In 1999, however, the important innovation was not financial but structural, namely the appointment of an assistant librarian, Claire Winters, an experienced librarian and elementary school teacher. The new position would not only prove popular but increasingly vital as library duties became more complex. The post is currently held by long-time volunteer Sonja Larsen, who maintains the collection and orders most of the books.
Claire and Louise were friends who had each been previously named Citizen of the Year for services to the town. They were ready to modernize the library and called for volunteers to help. The magnitude of the task can be seen from their immediate wish list: a toilet, a telephone, and a computer.
The need for the first was obvious: the sole bathroom was upstairs in Eunice’s apartment, a fact the board did not realize until Louise asked them to price a portable toilet for the yard. The board promptly voted to install one under the front stairs, sparing the volunteers awkward trips across to the sometimes locked Holt Hall.
The telephone and the computer produced an even bigger change. They opened the world, enabling the library to join Interlibrary Loan. ILL was a true revolution for small and underfunded libraries, because it enabled borrowing from libraries around the state.
ILL meant that a student could locate an obscure author biography, the garden fancier could read up on herbaceous borders, and the fan of a popular series could borrow a novel Fletcher was missing. Patrons are now familiar with the heavy plastic tubs filled with books from libraries near and far, but they may not know that Fletcher loans nearly as many volumes as it borrows, a testament to the quality of our collection.
Eunice remained in the apartment that had been her home for nearly four decades until her death in 2001. At that point, the library board took over the entire building, considerably increasing the available space. Fletcher Memorial had been maintained on a tight budget through difficult times but was seriously in need of an upgrade. At the dawn of the 21st century, the library board faced the task of turning a Victorian building with cosmetic issues and structural constraints into a thoroughly modern facility. This proved to be an undertaking of many years that has drawn contributions from a number of talented craftsmen. The library has benefited from the woodworking talents of both Steve Russo and board member Wendell Davis; repair work from Stan Crawford and John Berard, plus plumbing from Steve Dinsmore and landscaping and grounds work from Mike Chapel.
After taking over Eunice’s apartment, the library was able to put in a second, handicapped accessible toilet downstairs. Thanks to a major contribution from Roger and Jeanette Hoffman in memory of Donald Hoffman, the sunroom got a major upgrade and became a venue for the reading group. Upstairs, three large and handsome rooms were designated for nonfiction books and a library office. The rooms were cleaned up and painted, with Wendell building new bookshelves.
One of the small rooms at the back, formerly the apartment bedroom, became a storage area for the Friends of the Library, whose annual book sales were for years the chief fundraiser for the library. There were several incarnations of these sales, some including “white elephants” and baked goods with venues including the library lawn, next door at Holt Hall, and, more recently, the Town Hall.
Lately, the book market on the internet and the ease of digital downloads have impacted the library’s sponsored sales. Now Book & Bake coordinators Sue Hochstetter and Regina DeCesare find that baked goods and gift baskets often bring in more revenue than books, which in another change, are sold along with DVDs and audio books. Currently, the largest single source of extra revenue is the Fall Harvest Festival.
The final renovations downstairs involved the dark and frankly shabby children’s room. It was repaired and painted and immeasurably brightened by Ruth Halbach’s colorful murals. Outside, the Eunice Fuller memorial garden that Anne Christie designed was taking shape. With the interior brightened and the checkout desk up to standard, the library board began a big and successful fundraiser to patch and paint the exterior. The library was soon sparkling with a fresh coat of white paint, but there was an unexpected consequence, as library treasurer, Ellen Rodriguez, discovered several years later when she began to receive messages from the IRS.
The library, secure in being a true non-profit, had never filed tax returns. Unfortunately, the successful fund drive made Fletcher appear to be turning a profit. Board chair Jim Ryan counseled patience and a closed checkbook, but there were some anxious consultations and a letter to our congressman before the matter was sorted. The library ever after careful about official forms, eventually, entrusting tax matters to a professional accountant.
Modernization brought other unintended consequences. As the library responded to public demand with more public computer stations, security became an issue in two ways. On one occasion Linda Gorman had to hustle after a patron who, interpreting library policy too broadly, “borrowed” a router. The library also had to ask a teenaged IT expert to put a filter on the public machines to screen out pornography.
One significant non-digital change was the acquisition of a distinctly old fashioned, but essential tool, PW, the Publisher’s Weekly. Subscribing to the weekly “bible” of the publishing industry may not sound very exciting, but it is how our staff alert patrons about a favorite author’s new book and how Sonja Larsen, assistant librarian since 2005, can order interesting books months in advance. Incidentally, the reason Sonja knows what patrons want is because she regularly weeds the shelves and so knows which authors and subjects are popular. Only our local authors, considered a permanent part of the collection, escape her vigilance.
Janice Trecker
To be continued next month…