Pack Horse Librarians

In a time before computers and internet, a time when our nation was struggling with the Great Depression and its aftermath, the ability for people to get access to things like books was very limited…especially things like books. Due to the Great Depression and budget constraints, the American Library Association estimated in May 1936 that about a third of Americans no longer had adequate access to public library materials. That was when the government came up with a plan. The project was a Works Progress Administration (WPA) program. It was called the Pack Horse Library Project. The idea was to deliver books to remote regions in the Appalachian Mountains, and it ran between 1935 and 1943. Women played a key role in a project that established 30 libraries serving 100,000 people. Packhorse librarians were often called “book women,” “book ladies,” or “packsaddle librarians.” This initiative provided jobs for about 200 people and brought books to roughly 100,000 residents in rural Kentucky.

Eastern rural Kentucky, a geographically isolated region, was largely cut off from the rest of the country. Before the Pack Horse Library Project, many residents in Appalachian Kentucky had no access to books, with an illiteracy rate of around 31%. The people in these remote areas knew that an education was a way out of poverty, but with no access, their situation seemed impossible to escape. What might have been a way out, was made nearly impossible because, while traveling libraries were established by the Kentucky Federation of Women’s Clubs in 1896, the lack of roads and population centers in eastern Kentucky made public library services scarce. In Kentucky, 63 counties had no library services at all during the early 1930s. The traveling libraries were completely discontinued in 1943.

The first Pack Horse Library was established in Paintsville in 1913 by May F Stafford, with financial support from local coal baron John C C Mayo. Unfortunately, that program ended in 1914 due to a lack of funding after Mayo’s death. Then, Elizabeth Fullerton, working with the WPA’s women’s and professional projects, revived Stafford’s idea in 1934. A Presbyterian minister in Leslie County offered his library to the WPA, proposing they fund workers to deliver books to people with limited access to library materials. His generosity led to the first pack horse library, initially run by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) until the WPA took over in 1935. By 1936, eight pack horse libraries were operating.

Books were rotated between locations, selected to match the preferences of library patrons. The libraries’ collections mainly focused on children’s books. Maggie Mae Smith, a supervisor at the Whitley County Pack Horse Library, shared how children would eagerly run to meet the book women, exclaiming, “Bring me a book to read.” The books didn’t just go to children either. For adults, the collection highlighted topics like current events, history, religion, and biographies. The Bible was a top request, along with “instructive literature.” Other favorites included Robinson Crusoe and works by Mark Twain. The women enjoyed illustrated home magazines and books on health and parenting. A unique feature of the collection was the recipe and quilting pattern books women compiled by jotting down their favorites into binders and shared across the community. While the pack horse librarians and their program weren’t the complete solution to the problems, they went a long way toward making a difference in a time when it was needed.