04/11/2024
It's not commonly known, but GFWC had a major part in many things being starting in the US.
It's WHRC Wednesday - and it's National Library Outreach Day! We're going to celebrate old-school with the original name, National Bookmobile Day, and take a quick look at just one of the many GFWC-funded bookmobile programs in our history.
Here is "one of the first Bookmobiles," which "charted its trail over Vermont's (in 1923) very bad road system" to bring reading material to rural residents. It was the realized dream of Alice Coolidge, chairman of the Literary and Library Extension Committee of the Vermont Federation, after she solicited ten cents from each club member for the Book Wagon fund. The Vermont bookmobile was still going strong thirty years later when its story was published in the December 1954 issue of "Clubwoman", though by that point they were on their eighth, and more modern, vehicle.
Bookmobiles, "book wagons," and other traveling libraries were a big part of GFWC's 19th and 20th century library work; the 1954 article says that 671 bookmobiles, funded in full or in part by GFWC clubs, could be found on US roads that year. When I was a kid we went to the public library all the time, but the idea of a bookmobile that would bring the books right to me: heaven! I can only imagine how much more heavenly these book wagons were and are for those who can't get to the library in person.
Did your club start or maintain a bookmobile? Are you involved in Library Outreach today? Let us know - truly, the WHRC would love to add to our bookmobile research!
