Sunday, January 31, 2010

Sunday Salon - January 31


How To Start A Library:
Take a determined woman with an idea, a little red wagon and a giving community.

That woman with an idea was my great-grandmother, I can only imagine that the little red wagon may have belonged to my grandmother, and the community was the small Nebraska town where the family lived. The library started more than 100 years ago as a circulating library, officially becoming a library in the 1920's. My great-grandmother was a lifetime member of the library's board.


Knowing how important the library had been to my great-grandmother, when he died, my great-uncle left money to the town to begin a fund for a new building for the library. Despite being a town of only around 1000 people, the town worked hard to raise the remaining funds necessary for the new building and ground was broken in 2003. By the descendants of my great-grandmother!



Now if you visit the library, you will be reminded of one family's commitment to reading, when you plop down in a comfy chair in the center of the library named for my family. In this time of cutbacks that are so greatly effecting municipal libraries, if you have the means to do so, won't you please consider making a donation to your local library?




And the winner of a copy of Zoe Heller's The Believers is Victoria! Congratulations!

15 comments:

  1. How very nice for you community that your relative started the library! It's a good idea to recycle books by donating to libraries!

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  2. Wow! That's so awesome! The library is beautiful. I don't know what I'd do without my library; they are priceless.

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  3. Lisa...what a beautiful tribute to your great grandmother.

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  4. What an awesome heritage Lisa!!! I support my library all of the time!!

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  5. What a fabulous legacy, Lisa. And those chairs look divine! Hats off to your great-grandmother and her descendents for making reading a priority in your community. I love stories like this, and I love my local library and help it whenever I can.

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  6. It is a beautiful place, isn't it? Much nicer looking than the library I go to in a city 1,000 times as big as the town my dad grew up in!

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  7. This looks like just my kind of library:) What a wonderful legacy for your family...something to really be proud of!

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  8. What a great story and what a legacy for your family! Thanks for sharing it!

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  9. What an absolutely fantastic story! I loved hearing it......

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  10. Hi Lisa....

    I have an award for you.....

    http://missysbooknook.blogspot.com/2010/02/ive-been-given-award.html

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  11. I love this story! What a wonderful heritage. And you are carrying on the tradition with a 21st century twist! Also: Thanks for all your blogger support. You are my first follower on Steam Spectre! :-)

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  12. That is so nice. And what a beautiful library it is too. How wonderful to have such examples of hard work and generosity in the family. Glad you told us about this.

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  13. Wow! What a neat story. The library looks wonderful too.

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  14. What a wonderful legacy you get to be a part of! We should all support libraries.

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  15. That is such a cool story. And such a cute library.

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