This Day in American History (Tax-Supported Libraries)

April 9, 1833—Peterborough, N.H. agreed to support its local library through taxation – becoming the first library in the world to be funded through this means.

All kinds of other events occurred on this date in other years, both major (Turkey’s declaration that Islam would not become its state religion) and minor (First Lady Lucy Hayes began the annual egg-rolling contest on the White House lawn). But let’s focus on the occurrence in this small New England community—which, incidentally, is home of the MacDowell writers’ colony, where Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town, and, many say, was inspired by his walks here to create his immortal piece of Americana.

But the library event I celebrate is not only is dear to my heart, given my profession, but also ended up being copied by larger communities elsewhere.

I guess, if you want to be technical about it, Peterborough is not the first community to do so—the year before, Boston had taken that honor, passing the enabling legislation that would create the Boston Public Library. But Peterborough’s opened first, so it receives squatter’s rights. And, in a way, it might be more unusual that such a small community made the effort so early on.

Even the innovation pioneered by Boston and Peterborough—free, taxpayer-supported public libraries—took awhile to catch on. As late as 1887, New England accounted for 280 of the 424 taxpayer-supported libraries in the U.S., according to Joseph F. Ketts’ The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties: From Self-Improvement to Adult Education in America, 1750-1990.

Subscription libraries, such as the Philadelphia Library Company, founded by Ben Franklin in 1731, were a useful start, but they suffered from one weakness: in economic downturns, members cut funding. Taxpayer funding left public libraries somewhat less impervious to these recessions (or, at worst, even depressions).

I write “somewhat” because, whenever a municipality hits a fiscal crisis, library budgets still invariably end up among the first on the chopping block. Maybe it’s a holdover from the old-maid, “Marian the Librarian” stereotype, and a mistaken belief that a bunch of little ol’ biddies wouldn’t protest.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those who bleat about the salaries and/or pensions made by police and fire officials. But I’m sure other areas of city and town budgets can be reduced easily—except that the officials overseeing them always seem beholden to some relative’s idiot offspring or other.

But libraries perform multiple functions that make their existence necessary to any modern civilization. To start with, they should be seen as, in a sense, a corollary to education. They provide students with the resources—i.e., books—they need to learn.

Second—and this might make more sense to politicians who, like Charles Dickens’ Thomas Gradgrind in Hard Times, wants to “Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts”—information is the fuel of the global economy, and libraries knowledge how to organize it, put it at people’s disposal fast, recall it or find it in a hurry.

I really have to laugh when I hear politicians think communities don’t need libraries anyway because “the Internet has everything.” For one thing, I hate to disappoint you, guys, but it doesn’t. There’s a whole group of older materials that is not on the Internet and may well never be, and many organizations make their materials available only to members rather than the general public.

Even more important, if you think of the Internet as one big library, it’s really a library in which the online public access catalogs (replacing those card catalogs) are gone and the books themselves dumped all over the floor in no particular order. Who’s going to find them?

But above all, what the good citizens of Peterborough knew 175 years ago is this: the information that libraries provide can be obtained as easily by the poor as by the rich man. I don’t think it’s coincidental that Peterborough’s decision occurred in the Jacksonian Era, when ordinary Americans transformed the young republic from the patrician-dominated elite to the more egalitarian polity we know today.

Peterborough was recently named one of the “10 Coolest Small Towns” in America by Budget Travel Magazine, and for sure its two theater groups and the artistic spirit springing from the MacDowell Colony are responsible for much of this vibe. But as far as I’m concerned, that library gives it even more cachet.