Library at Town Hall 1878-1900

The Library at Town Hall, 1878-1900 

Joseph M. Weisberg

The WFPL was an established institution by the time it moved into the new town hall. It had developed a governance structure headed by the “Library Committee” and administered on a daily basis by the librarian and his assistants in Cochituate. As a result, the historical record from this period frequently describes the mundane but necessary details of daily management like purchasing and rebinding books, repairing and improving the library room, compiling catalogs, inspecting the stacks each year, appointing personnel, advocating for funding, and other duties that helped the library function. It would be impossible to fully inventory the small tasks that have supported the library’s operations in the past or the present. However, by paying attention to some of the details of how the library operated, we can begin to appreciate the labor of Wayland residents whose contributions to the community have frequently faded into the background.

Who’s Running the Library?

From the beginning, the WFPL was managed by a committee of residents who oversaw its affairs. The library’s first regulations provided for the election of “a committee designated the Library Committee consisting of no less than three persons,” at the annual town meeting.¹  By the late nineteenth century, the committee had grown to six members who were elected to three-year terms on a rotating basis so that only two people were elected annually. Its basic duties, mostly an unglamorous list of administrative tasks, were also inscribed in Library regulations. 

Throughout the late nineteenth century, it also concerned itself with what became a national conversation about the morality of the books in its collection. Although the moral impact of libraries had been a topic of conversation since John Burt Wight used the “intellectual and moral advancement” of Bay Staters to defend his library bill, the issue took on a renewed importance in the early 1880s.² Boston Public Library cataloguer James M. Hubbard initiated the controversy when he published a series of articles criticizing the BPL for circulating series fiction to children. With this controversy apparently in mind, the Committee assured the town, “So far as possible, we have guarded the shelves from all books that are morally unhealthy.”³  Subsequent reports returned to the topic, giving similar assurances and at one point instructing parents to exercise discretion in choosing what their children read. Sustained research may reveal what the Committee deemed “immoral” literature, but it is clear that the Committee engaged the larger conversation surrounding the role of fiction at public libraries. 

However, the committee’s historical significance may exceed its circumscribed role as administrators of the Library. As town historian Helen Fitch Emery has noted, women served on the Library and School Committees during the latter part of the nineteenth century. In fact, women sometimes constituted a majority of Trustees during this period, though by the turn of the century men had come to dominate the committee. Some women like Emily Heard and Ellen Braman—whose husband Hodijah was also politically active and chaired the committee charged with building the structure that housed the library—served on the committee for over a decade.

The WFPL also welcomed its first female librarian during the late nineteenth century. In 1885, James S. Draper retired after two decades at the helm of the library. In his place, the Library Committee appointed Sarah E. Heard, a widow whose house had been relocated to make space for the new Town Hall and who had been among the first ten women to register to vote in Wayland.⁴  As librarian, she would serve for sixteen years until she resigned in 1901.⁵  Her arrival marked the beginning of a tradition of long-serving women librarians at the WFPL. In the years since, four more women—Sarah Heard, Margaret Wheeler, Marjorie Ferris, Louise Brown, and Ann Knight—have spent more than a decade at the helm of the library.⁶

This trend towards women working and influencing the library was not absolute. As noted above, women seem to have lost influence on the Library Committee around the end of the nineteenth century, and even when they did constitute a majority, women rarely served as the chair or secretary of the committee. However, the trend towards women’s involvement at the WFPL reflects a nationwide development as women became familiar faces in local libraries. For instance, seventeen of the twenty people who composed Melvil Dewey’s first class of students training to be professional librarians in 1887 were women. For her part, Sarah Heard also typified another idiosyncrasy of her time: she was not a professionally trained librarian. Even after professional training became available, many small-town libraries hired untrained local women because library schools could not meet the national demand for librarians. 

Sarah Heard’s Library: The 1890s at the WFPL 

As Sarah Heard entered the middle third of her tenure, she called attention to major problems with the library’s physical condition. “The manner of heating the library room,” she wrote in 1891, “is a more serious drawback to its interests than has been fully realized.” Her report also noted the “at times very wavy and uncertain” lighting and the “want of room” in the library.  Put differently, Heard depicted a library room that was cold, dim, and overcrowded. She demonstrated the severity of the problem later in her report when she wrote that the library staff needed “a temperature which is at least safe” in order to properly oversee the care of books.⁷  She and the Trustees would continue to cite the material issues with the library. In 1893, for example, Heard and her staff stopped the mandatory examination of books because the library room was too cold. These issues may have been partially resolved by making repairs and alterations, such as the Trustees reported in 1894, but we can imagine that they would not be completely resolved until the library found a new home in 1900. 

In the meantime, Heard called attention to another mounting problem: cataloging the books in the library. In 1893, she reported that the library had not cataloged its accessions in five years, a longer period than had passed between any two supplements. The Trustees joined her call the following year and two years later. They explained the problem, “We have upon our Library shelves the accessions of seven years uncatalogued, and it must be clear to the mind of every one that the greater part of the town’s people are deprived of the benefit to be derived from those books.”⁸  They got their wish at the town’s annual meeting. On March 25, the town voted to appropriate $375 for a new library catalog. 

What happened next would define how generations of WFPL patrons interacted with their library. Rather than simply compile and print a bound catalog, as the library had since it first opened in 1850, the Trustees elected to adopt a card catalog system. They did not take too long to reach the decision. They held an extra meeting in May to discuss plans for the new catalog where they charged Emily Heard with consulting with experts. They seem to have reached a consensus by August 31, when they appointed Emily Heard and R.T. Lombard to handle “the business of adopting the Card Catalog.”⁹  Heard worked with local resident Edgar J. Banks to finish the catalog.¹⁰  In their annual report published the following year, the Trustees justified the decision by arguing that the appropriation of $375 was insufficient to produce a bound catalog. They prophetically concluded, “It cannot be expected that a change so radical can be made without criticism or that all will be suited yet we believe that in time the wisdom of the change will be fully vindicated.”¹¹  They were almost certainly vindicated. In the twentieth century, the card catalog came to define how many patrons interacted with the library not just in Wayland but across the globe.

The debate over the appropriations for the catalog point towards a larger theme that reappeared through the 1890s: requests for increased funding. The town may have been especially tightfisted in the wake of the failure of the Wm. and J.M. Bent Company, a shoe manufacturer in Cochituate that employed about five hundred people, in May of 1891. Regardless of the cause, the library found it difficult to secure funding that it felt necessary. For instance, in 1893, the Trustees asked for an increased appropriation in order to open twice a week like neighboring towns and to make improvements to the reading room. They repeated their request for increased funding to open more frequently again in 1895 and 1896. The town heeded their request in 1896, which allowed the library to open from three o’clock to five-thirty on Wednesday afternoons. The WFPL, in a development that mirrored a national trend towards libraries’ collaboration with public schools, hoped the expanded hours would make their collections more accessible to local school teachers and students. This plan also realized a long-time desire within the WFPL, which had called for increased collaboration with the public schools since James Draper was librarian over a decade earlier. 

 However, the increased appropriation did not last long. The following year, the town reduced the library’s appropriation from $500 to $300. The Trustees used their annual report to voice their opinion on the matter: 

_{We have had to compel our librarian to say to very many inquirers for more new books that we haven’t them for lack of funds to buy with.} 

_{Last spring there was a spasm of economy that struck some of our people that only affected our library, and we were granted but three-fifths of what we asked for, and needed, for we had decided that the library should be opened twice a week, deeming a six months’ trial warranted it, causing some more expense, yet we were cut down $200 in appropriation, so our new list of additions is much shorter than we wish.¹²}

Although the library’s funding was restored in 1899, debates over money continued to influence its management. Most notably, in 1901, Sarah Heard requested extra compensation in order to open the library on Wednesday evenings. In response, the Trustees informed her that they would accept her resignation rather than increase her salary. Her resignation was effective on July 1, ending her long and sometimes tumultuous tenure as librarian. 

Finding a New Home: The Roby Bequest 

By the time Sarah Heard left the library, the WFPL had moved yet again. After resident and merchant Warren G. Roby died in November of 1897, he left the town a half-acre of land and $28,000 for a new public library building. The town accepted the bequest in March and appointed a committee to oversee the operation in October. The Library Building Committee wasted no time getting to work, reporting the following March that they had already visited other small libraries in the area and hired Professor Francis W. Chandler of MIT to assist them. 

In their preliminary investigations, the committee also encountered a problem that continues to affect the library and the politics surrounding it. They reported, “From the first, your committee has regretted that the will of Mr. Roby restricts them in their choice of library site. The building, which, in itself, is hoped to be an architectural feature of the town, must of necessity be built upon a side hill and low, marshy land.”¹³  The committee was disappointed enough with the site that they solicited legal opinions about whether they could build the library elsewhere, but they were advised against doing so and abandoned the idea. Instead, they oversaw a competition for building plans on the land Roby had donated. After soliciting plans from fourteen architects, they selected the proposal of Cabot, Everett, and Mead and contracted Fales and Co. of South Framingham to complete the project. 

The new building was supposed to open in time to celebrate the library’s fiftieth anniversary on August 7, 1900.¹⁴  However, construction delays canceled the dedication ceremony that had been planned, and the library did not move until November. Its new home, a small red brick building less than a quarter-mile away from its original location, dazzled the Boston Globe. The paper wrote, “The interior impresses one with the perfect harmony of character and design.”¹⁵  The new building also marked a milestone for the WFPL as an institution: it no longer had to share space with other town departments and offices. In a literal sense, the library stood on its own, signaling its central place within the community to visitors and residents alike.

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Footnotes
^{1  “Library Regulations,” in First Record-Book, begun in 1850 by Henry Wight. Unpublished. WFPL Archives.
2  John Burt Wight, “Our Common School System, No. XV.” Common School Journal 13, no. 17 (September 1851): 206. A copy of this publication is available in the Library – Miscellaneous collection at the WFPL.
3  “Report of the Library Committee” (1881) in Official Reports of the Town of Wayland, Vol. 2, 38.
4  We would like to thank Jane Sciacca and Katherine Gardner-Westcott of the Wayland Historical Society for providing biographical information on Sarah Heard. Sciacca shared a brief biography of Heard that she had previously written for an exhibition on women at Wayland Town Hall.
5  The WFPL was something of a family affair for the Heards. Researchers interested in the early history of the WFPL will notice that other members of the family were involved with the Library. Of the individuals mentioned in this text, we can indicate the following relationships: Sarah was related to Emily, who served as a trustee for over a decade until her death in 1896, through Sarah’s late husband John. Emily was also a cousin of Jared M. Heard, the local minister who wrote the pamphlet Origin of the Free Public Library System of Massachusetts. For more on the Heard family relationships, see John H. Edwards, A History of the Heard Family of Wayland, Mass. (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1880). We would like to thank Sandra Coy of Wayland for helping to clarify the relationships between the Heards.
6  We would like to thank Marjanneke Wright for sharing her internal reference document on librarians at the WFPL. We referenced a draft version of the document, which she and Sandra Coy have since completed. It is available in the Library – Miscellaneous collection at the WFPL.
7  Sarah E. Heard, “Librarian’s Report” (1891) in Official Reports of the Town of Wayland, Vol. 3
8  “Report of the Library Trustees for the Year Ending Feb 28, 1895,” in Official Reports of the Town of Wayland, Vol. 4, 60.
9  Wayland Public Library Trustees Minutes, Vol 2, 24-25. See note 2 in “Was Wayland First” about page numbers in the Trustee minutes.
10  Banks was famous in his own right as an archaeologist whose legacy is marked by controversy. For an example of the controversy over Banks, see Nancy Freudenthal, “Edgar James Banks,” Harvard Magazine, November-December 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20221127165529/https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2021/11/feature-vita-edgar-james-banks.
11  “Report of the Library Trustees for the Year Ending Feb 28, 1895,” 29.
12  “Report of Library Trustees” (1898)  in Official Reports of the Town of Wayland, Vol. 4, 33.
13  “Report of the Library Building Committee” (1899) in Official Reports of the Town of Wayland, Vol. 4, 54.
14  Anniversaries are not always clear-cut. In 1900, the event planners hoped to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of when the WFPL first opened its doors in 1850. The present publication has been compiled in celebration of the one hundred seventy-fifth anniversary of the vote to establish a library in 1848. As discussed above, it took over two years for the vote to materialize into a functioning library.
15  “First Free Library in the State,” Boston Globe, 8 August 1900, 2. The Globe also gave a longer description of the architectural features of the library. A copy of this article is available in the Library History – Miscellaneous collection (see bibliography).}

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Bibliography

Emery, Helen Fitch. The Puritan Village Evolves: A History of Wayland, Massachusetts. Canaan, NH: Wayland Historical Commission, 1981.

First Record-Book, begun in 1850 by Henry Wight. Unpublished. WFPL Archives. 

Library Trustee Records. Box 1, 1848-1929. Unpublished. WFPL Archives.

Official Reports of the Town of Wayland. Vol 2-4. 1876-1901. Internet Archive. 

Sciacca, Jane. “Sarah Hawkes Heard.” Unpublished. Personal correspondence with the author. 

Wayland Library History – Miscellaneous [collection]. Unpublished. WFPL Archives. 

Wayland Public Library Trustee Minutes. Vol 1-2, 1870-1905. Original and Transcribed Editions. Transcribed by Sally Cartwright, Nancy Westbom, Sandy Coy, and Katherine Gardner-Westcott.

Wayland Town Meeting Minutes. Vol. 3-4, 1854-1901. Digital Commonwealth. https://ark.digitalcommonwealth.org/ark:/50959/bc386z701

Wiegand, Wayne A. Part of Our Lives: A People’s History of the American Public Library. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Wright, Marjanneke, comp. “WFPL Library Directors/Librarians.” Unpublished. Personal correspondence with the author.