Mary Titcomb: Bringing Books to the People by Linda Harris Sittig

Before we had Kindle and Nooks and E-Readers, we had stand-alone bookstores and public libraries. Today, most of us take our easy access to books for granted.

But a hundred and twenty years ago in America, public libraries existed mostly in cities and towns. If you lived in a rural area, there was little access to books.

Enter Mary Titcomb, a young woman born in 1852 in Farmington, New Hampshire.

Mary grew up in a home with parents who instilled in her the love of reading. As a young adult she was living in Concord, Massachusetts, when she read that her church was in need of a librarian. It seemed like a match made in heaven, someone who loved books could help bring them to other people.

However, there was no established system in the late 1800s on how a person should go about becoming a librarian.

So, Mary volunteered to work in the public library in Concord and learned the ins and outs of librarianship. Sometime later she applied for a job at the Rutland Public Library in Vermont and held that job for twelve years.

Then in 1901 Mary moved to Washington County, Maryland to organize the Washington County Free Library, the second county library system to open in the United States.

While working at the library in Hagerstown, Maryland, Mary was concerned that the supply of books was only available to patrons who lived in town. She came up with the idea to house small movable collections in various post offices and stores throughout Washington County where local people could check out books. But who would maintain those collections and oversee their distribution?

Then Mary came up with the ingenious idea that she could design a book wagon and take it on the road, so to speak, driving out in the country and bringing rotating collections to rural families.

She set about designing a wagon, similar to a city milk wagon or turn of the century tinker’s wagon. Mary’s blueprint showed where multiple shelves of books would sit firmly on both sides of the vehicle. An interior space held extra volumes. All told, 200 books would be available.

Mary launched her book wagon in April of 1905. Joshua Thomas, the library janitor, hitched up two horses, Dandy and Black Beauty, and headed out of Hagerstown onto the rural roads of Washington County. Mary had given him strict directives that when he stopped at a farmhouse or rural cluster of homes, he should give patrons ample time to select a book of their choice. The books were free of charge and would be on loan for two weeks.

In the first six months, the book wagon made a recorded total of 31 trips out in the countryside. The library wagon would continue these trips weekly for the next five years until it was involved in a significant accident. Neither Joshua nor the horses were hurt, but the wagon and most of the books were ruined.

Washington County then decided to designate funds for the purchase of a motorized wagon to replace the old horse-drawn one. A year later, the new vehicle was called the Bookmobile—the first known mechanical vehicle in the United States to bring books into rural America.

While bookmobiles struggled to keep their funding during the Great Depression of the 1930s, most of them did survive until the 21^st Century when technology supplemented delivering books directly to neighborhoods. There are approximately 650 bookmobiles still in operation in America today, mostly in rural counties.

Mary died at the age of eighty in 1932, but not before she had realized her life’s goal—to enrich people’s lives through reading.

In her own words, “books bring people pleasure because through books they are lifted out of all routine of everyday life, their imaginations are quickened and in the brief space that the books hold them in thrall, the colors of life assume a bright tint.”

I applaud the passion and perseverance of Mary Titcomb and thank her for her marvelous innovation. I was one of the kids who waited for the bookmobile each summer.

If you enjoyed Mary Titcomb’s story, please sign up on the sidebar to become a regular follower of this blog.  You can also catch me on Twitter @LHsittig or lindasittig.com, my website. My novels that feature strong women in history, Cut From Strong Cloth and Last Curtain Call are available in bookstores and online through Amazon.  www.amzn.com/1940553024.

~ Linda