WFPL at the Town House 1851-1878

The Early Days: the WFPL at the Town House, 1851-1878

Joseph M. Weisberg

The Library Finally Opens

The library opened before the debate over its legality was fully resolved. The Wayland Town Library welcomed patrons for the first time on August 7, 1850. Although some sources have erroneously claimed otherwise, Henry Wight served as the town’s first librarian. Town reports from 1852 show that Wight was owed twenty-five dollars “for services as Librarian.”¹  As librarian, Wight was responsible for a collection of about seven hundred volumes during the library’s inaugural year. By July of 1852, the collection had more than doubled, and it would continue to grow throughout the library’s early years. In fact, the collection expanded so much that in 1861 the library relocated to a more spacious room in the same building. 

The earliest days of the library were tumultuous. Town meeting records show that the Library Committee was instructed to close the library on August 19, 1850. The source of the issue was the fourth article of the library regulations. The earliest existing copy of the regulation lists the library’s limited hours and grants the librarian exclusive access to the stacks. Both aspects of the regulation were typical of small-town libraries in the nineteenth century. Given the haphazard process of locating and outfitting a space for the library (see “Finding a Home”), it seems probable that closing the stacks to the public proved a more significant challenge than following the regulations of when to open and close the library room. However, based on the available evidence, we cannot make a firm conclusion about what exactly caused the library to close, nor can we confirm that the library ever heeded the order from the town meeting and shut its doors. 

Honoring Their Patron

The town held a major celebration to honor its library benefactor, President Francis Wayland of Brown University, on August 26 of 1851. Upon his arrival, President Wayland was taken to view the library before heading to the First Parish Church for a program in his honor. As he walked to the church, President Wayland would have witnessed firsthand how grateful the town was for his philanthropy. Townspeople, most likely men, organized into two rows along President Wayland’s short route to the church and removed their hats as the great patron passed them. They then formed a formal procession and followed the president into the church. 

In the church, the event organizers consciously arranged the attendees so that women and children were not prominent participants in the event. The only women included in the procession were school teachers. In contrast, the procession featured “male citizens, generally” who entered after town officers and committee members but before the school teachers and their students. Once everyone was seated, women were not permitted to sit in the central aisle of the church. Instead, they were instructed to sit in the wing and side pews, presumably reserving the central pews for men. Children were permitted to attend the event unless the church was “crowded to overflowing,” in which case they would wait outside while their teachers were permitted to remain inside.²

The event itself featured prayers, hymns, personal introductions to President Wayland, singing, speeches from prominent attendees, and a light meal. Over the course of the day, Edward Mellen, John Burt Wight, President Wayland, and education reformer Horace Mann delivered speeches.³  Wight delivered a short speech that recalled his activism in the legislature and called for the “establishment, increase, and perpetuation” of free public libraries.⁴  President Wayland delivered a similar speech, recognizing the importance of the WFPL as a trendsetter in the national free public library movement. He concluded his speech, “The law of Massachusetts respecting town libraries; may it be enacted by every state in the Union and by every land on Earth.”⁵  Fortunately, other towns and states heard these supplications, if not in actuality then at least in spirit. Over a hundred and sixty-five years later, there are over nine thousand public libraries in the United States. 

The 1860s at the WFPL 

By 1861, the library’s collection had more than quadrupled from its original size of seven hundred volumes and no longer fit in the small room it inhabited since it first opened. As a result, the town voted to refurbish a larger room in the Town House that had previously served as a schoolroom and moved the library to these larger quarters. To honor the occasion, the town held a rededication ceremony on July 4. 

The rededication of the Wayland Town Library was not the only thing on the mind of Wayland residents in July of 1861. Abraham Lincoln had taken the oath of office just four months earlier, and the Confederate States had already won the Civil War’s first battle at Fort Sumter. The rededication ceremony offered townspeople a way to express their support for the Union in the early days of the Civil War. The first half of the exercises featured the newly formed Wayland Light Infantry, veterans from the War of 1812, the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and a salute to the flag by the soldiers. 

The second half of the celebration focused more directly on the library. The townspeople took advantage of the opportunity to contribute to their public library, just as they had thirteen years earlier when they directly funded the WFPL. The Natick Observer reported that among the various speeches and festivities:

_{In the afternoon, the procession was formed again under the direction of F.F Heard Esq , Chief Marshal of the day; after a short march it arrived at the new Library rooms, where all those that could, went in, most of the citizens carrying a book of some kind to present as an addition to the library.⁶}

Thus, the rededication of the library allowed the people of Wayland to express their patriotic support for the Union while also providing an outlet to demonstrate their civic pride. 

The end of the war coincided with another major change at the library. In 1865, James Sumner Draper replaced Henry Wight as librarian, serving in this capacity for twenty years. Draper also fulfilled a number of roles beyond his title as librarian: he was an active businessman, poet, historian, community member, and library donor. He left such a noticeable mark on the library that many commenters have mistakenly thought that he was the town’s first librarian.

Continued Expansion: The 1870s at the WFPL 

The 1870s continued the trend of rapid expansion at the WFPL. In particular, two events transformed the library and its ability to serve the community. First, the library introduced a book delivery system that made it easily accessible to residents of Cochituate Village. Later in the decade, the library moved to more spacious quarters in the newly constructed town hall. However, these events did not unfold quite as peacefully as we might imagine. As the 1870s began, the WFPL often found itself entangled in a larger rivalry between the wealthier residents of north Wayland and the more populous village of Cochituate to the south. From the library’s perspective, this local conflict proved quite productive. 

In 1874, the WFPL made a major change to its service area when it began delivering books to Cochituate Village. Although residents in Cochituate had been eligible to borrow books, they were practically excluded from doing so because they would have had to travel a total of twelve miles to retrieve and return a book.⁷  As a result, fewer than twenty-five books reached Cochituate each year. In contrast, the Library Committee reported that more than four thousand volumes circulated in Cochituate in 1874 and humbly declared that the new system “may, without much impropriety, be regarded as an era in the history of our Library.”⁸

However, the new book delivery system placed the library at the center of an ongoing dispute between north Wayland and Cochituate. The Trustees of the Library first considered the idea of expanding the library system to Cochituate in 1870. The town voted the following year to appoint a committee to make the WFPL books available at “some suitable place in Cochituate Village.”⁹  Some residents in north Wayland feared that the expansion of the library to Cochituate might ultimately result in its relocation and took steps to ensure that the WFPL would remain in Wayland Center for generations to come. Perhaps most notably, James S. Draper and his son William placed conditions on their donations that stipulated that the library must remain in Wayland Center.

A small change in the library catalog provides another window into the centrality of this debate. Although the library regulations had always contained a clause that required the collection to remain undivided in Wayland Center, the 1875 catalog placed more emphasis on the location issue. The new regulation introduced language that previously appeared third in the order of regulations into the library’s first article. It now read, “ARTICLE I. The Library shall be known as THE WAYLAND TOWN LIBRARY, and shall be kept undivided, in some suitable room or building in the central village of Wayland.”¹⁰  Any library patron in Wayland or Cochituate who consulted the catalog would have seen the regulation atop the first page of the catalog and clearly understood its implications: the library may have expanded its service area, but its location in Wayland Center was not up for debate.

The local rivalry between Cochituate and north Wayland also resulted in a major upgrade for the library. By 1877, Cochituate had already made clear its desire to build a new water works to improve fire protection for the large shoe factories in town and were willing to compromise with their neighbors to the north in order to get it done. As a result, the town approved two building projects on October 5: water works in Cochituate and a new town hall in Wayland Center. The new Town Hall, which was located at the current site of the Wayland Historical Society, contained new and more spacious quarters for the library. The town held a dedication ceremony for its new municipal building on Christmas Eve 1878 and published an account of the festivities the following year. 

Unlike the library’s earlier locations in the 1841 Town House, we have ample information about what the new library quarters looked like. The new building had a separate entrance for the library on the south side of the building, the remnants of which can still be seen on the grounds of the Wayland Historical Society. The new library contained two rooms: a reception room and a reading room. The WFPL has preserved the original plans for the library, which show the layout of furniture, books, and stairs in the two rooms. The Library Committee was apparently pleased with their new space and described it as “ample, attractive, and commodious.”¹¹ 

The new library featured many pieces of art. The space itself was frescoed, and it contained a number of paintings of local figures and busts of three nationally prominent men.¹²  The paintings and busts were not purely decorative. Many, but not all, of the works portrayed religious figures such as Reverends Francis Wayland, Edmund H. Sears, and John Burt Wight, among others. As Wayland native Elbridge Smith put it in his lengthy dedicatory address, “You have called in the aid of art to enforce the instructions of the printed page.”¹³  In other words, Smith hoped that the images of these great men would set an example for library patrons and improve the overall public character. This goal did not deviate much from John Burt Wight’s original vision for public libraries as places that would contribute to the intellectual and moral advancement of the town’s residents. 

Nonetheless, as he sat on the podium as an honored guest during the building dedication in 1878, Wight may have reflected upon how much the library had changed since he first advocated for its establishment nearly three decades earlier. The library that had once struggled to find adequate quarters and suffered a dubious legal status now stood on firm ground as it moved into its new home. In a major change, the library now occupied a space that had been intentionally designed for it in a prominent building in the center of town. In short, the fray between Cochituate and north Wayland may have produced tension throughout town, but it also provided the resources to transform the library and affirm its place in the community.

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Footnotes
^{1  “Valuation of the Real Estate in the Town of Wayland May 1st, 1850. Also, the Receipts and Expenditures of the Said Town from April 5th, 1851, to April 1st, 1852”  in Official Reports of the Town of Wayland, Vol. 1, 1851-1876, 27.
2  [Event planning notes], in Beginnings of the Wayland Library. Unpublished. WFPL Archives.
3  Further research may bring to light more details about the speeches than we were able to uncover in time for the library’s one hundred seventy-fifth anniversary. Evidence of Mellen and Mann’s attendance can be found in a handwritten entry to Beginnings of the Wayland Library that was likely written and compiled about twenty-five years after the event.
4  “Speech of the Rev. John Burt Wight at the Library Celebration August 26, 1851” [copy]. Unpublished. Library – Miscellaneous. WFPL Archives.
5  [Address at Library Celebration in Wayland, Massachusetts], 26 August 1851, Francis Wayland family papers, MS-1C-4, Brown University Archives. This quotation has been lightly edited for legibility.
6  “Celebration in Wayland,” Natick Observer, 6 July 1861, p. 2.
7  Cochituate Village is approximately three miles from Wayland Center. Potential library patrons would have had to make two trips of six miles each: three miles to the library to retrieve a book and another three miles back home, repeating the trip to return the book.
8  [Annual Report of the Library Committee 1874-1875], in Beginnings of the Wayland Library. Italics are original to the source.
9  Town Meeting Minutes, Vol. 3, 2 May 1871. Digital Commonwealth.
10  Catalog of the Public LIbrary of the Town of Wayland (Boston: Franklin Press, 1875), 5. WFPL Archives.
11  “Library Committee’s Report” (1879) in Official Reports of the Town of Wayland, Vol. 2, 1876-1883, 40.
12  According to the volume printed to commemorate the opening of the new town hall in 1878, the library contained portraits of local figures Francis Wayland, John Burt Wight, Edward Mellen, Edmund H. Sears, and James Draper (father of librarian James S. Draper). It also contained busts of historian William H. Prescott, scientist Louis Agassiz, and Unitarian minister William E. Channing. See Proceedings at the Dedication of the Town Hall, Wayland, December 24, 1878: With Brief Historical Sketches of Public Buildings and Libraries (Boston: Rockwell & Churchill, 1879), 47-51, 79.
13  Elbridge Smith, “Dedicatory Address” in Proceedings, 47.}

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Bibliography

Beginnings of the Wayland Library. Unpublished. WFPL Archives. 

Brown, Louise R. “The Cochituate Branch Library.” WFPL website. 29 April 2015. Last accessed September 22, 2022. https://web.archive.org/web/20170325215929/https://waylandlibrary.org/aboutus/about-wpl/history/cochituate-branch-history/

“Celebration in Wayland,” Natick Observer, 6 July 1861, p. 2. Natick Historical Newspapers Digital Archive. Morse Institute. Natick, MA. [See also “Correspondence,” Natick Observer, 13 July 1861, p. 2]

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 Catalogs [various years]. WFPL Archives. 

Official Reports of the Town of Wayland. Vol. 1-2. 1851-1883. Internet Archive. 

Pelczar, Marish, Jake Soffronoff, Evan Nielsen, Jiayi Li, and Sam Mabile. Data File Documentation: Public Libraries in the United States Fiscal Year 2020. Washington, DC: Institute of Museum and Library Services, 2022.  

Proceedings at the Dedication of the Town Hall, Wayland, December 24, 1878: With Brief Historical Sketches of Public Buildings and Libraries. Boston: Rockwell & Churchill, 1879.

Wayland, Francis. “Address at Library Celebration in Wayland, Massachusetts.” Francis Wayland Family Papers. Box 3, Folder 72. John Hay Library. Brown University. Providence, RI. Transcribed at the WFPL by Sandy Coy in June 2022. 

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

Wayland Public Library Trustee Minutes. Vol 1, 1870-1889. Original and Transcribed Editions. Transcribed by Sally Cartwright, Nancy Westbom, Sandra L. Coy, and Katherine Gardner-Westcott. Internet Archive. 

Wayland Town Meeting Minutes. Vol. 2-3, 1817-1882. Digital Commonwealth. https://ark.digitalcommonwealth.org/ark:/50959/bc386z701