The Women Who Delivered Books On Horseback For $28 A Month

In April 1905, Mary Lemist Titcomb, head librarian of the Washington County Free Library in Hagerstown, Maryland, dispatched a horse-drawn wagon full of books to farm families. The library’s janitor, Joshua Thomas, piloted the wagon across some 500 square miles of rural territory. By 1910, he listed his occupation on the census as “Book Missionary.” This was a private library venture, three decades before the advent of any such government-backed project.

In 1913, May Stafford, a librarian in Paintsville, Kentucky, began carrying donated books by horse to remote cabins. Her work was funded by an eastern Kentucky coal magnate named John C.C. Mayo. When Mayo died the next year, so did the money, and Stafford’s project closed after a year or so. She didn’t stay away for good, though: in 1937, she came back to the same county to supervise 25 of the Works Progress Administration’s (WPA) new packhorse librarians.

Berea College, a school for Appalachian students located in central Kentucky, ran its own mountain outreach from 1916 to 1934. Staff and volunteers delivered rotating wooden book chests by horse-drawn wagon and saddlebag into eastern Kentucky hollows, continuing the private efforts of Mary Lemist Titcomb and May Stafford in other parts of the region. It was a college effort rather than a government one, but it did show there was a market for books.

At the end of 1934, a Presbyterian minister named Benton Deaton of Hyden, Kentucky, made a donation of his community center’s unused books. His one condition was that the government had to hire workers to deliver them. Elizabeth Fullerton, then the director of the WPA’s Women’s Projects in Kentucky, accepted Deaton’s challenge and launched a pilot library project in Hyden that was folded into the WPA in 1935. The Pack Horse Library Project had begun.

Under the WPA rules of relief, the packhorse librarians received just $28 a month, period. The national government didn’t supply them with money for books, for horses, or for buildings. They were expected to buy or rent their own mounts, feed and shoe them if necessary, and raise their own funds for library materials. Building supplies had to come from local donations. Every horseshoe and every bookcase in the whole program would have to come from somewhere other than the capital.

When the WPA workers arrived in eastern Kentucky, the mountain folk were suspicious of them. They feared the workers would take their land or meddle in their lives. Thus, administrators recruited about 1,000 local women, known as book ladies, who knew the families and traditions along the book route. This decision, historian Donald C. Boyd writes, was the key to getting the books past the locked door.

In the absence of paved mountain roads, the librarians rode over rock-strewn creek beds, some of which were appropriately named Cut Shin Creek, Troublesome Creek, and Hell-for-Sartin Creek. Each trip typically covered around 20 miles per day. Librarians had up to 50 pounds of books to distribute in saddlebags or large sacks, and their pack mules, laden on each side, could carry double that.

Grace Caudill Lucas, a young single mom who worked as one of Lee County’s packhorse librarians, paid a local farmer 50 cents a day to ride Bill. She rented him three days a week, and that amounted to more than 20% of her monthly salary, which was $28. Where the trail ran along narrow cliff ledges, she dismounted and walked alongside Bill, leading him by the hand in case he stumbled. Lucas recounted these experiences many years later when she participated in oral history interviews about her time as a packhorse librarian.

Mary Ruth Shuler Dieter (1921 to 2019), who served as a packhorse librarian in Owsley County, Kentucky, said in one of the recorded oral histories that during the winter, the creek would splash over her iron stirrups and freeze in place, leaving her feet stuck fast. Other riders throughout the region had the same experience, according to field records. And there are inspection records of instances when a rider’s horse or mule died on the trail, forcing her to carry her 50-pound saddlebags and finish an 18-mile route on foot.

Packhorse library headquarters usually ran out of donated space in a post office, church, or courthouse, with no budget for furniture or supplies. Card catalogs were made out of discarded wooden cheese boxes, bookends were bent from old license plates, and fruit crates were used for storage. Books were often delivered in such bad condition that they needed to be put in the “book hospital,” where the clerk would “re-back” the broken spines with cheesecloth and tape, and patch the torn pages with paste and strips of paper.

Lacking adequate stock and funds to purchase additional items, some librarians resorted to clipping stories, articles, and pictures from tattered magazines and then gluing them into cardboard covers to create what might best be called a “scrapbook.” In 1940, over 2,500 such items in 11 categories were in use in the area, serving as actual library material that could be checked out and returned as could any other volume.

Librarians also received contributions from mountain families in the region, who gave their homemade recipes, cures, quilt designs, and ballads to be bound into the county scrapbooks along with the magazine clippings. They were making themselves into the de facto co-authors of the library collection, essentially. Yet for all of that innovation, no money was exchanged for loans. Every service was free, as required by WPA regulations.

In 1938, district supervisors received four hand-held Tru-Vuers, along with 40 filmstrips of three-dimensional still pictures like the ones that became popular as View-Masters in later years. Family members who had never stepped out of their own hollow could look into the device and view national monuments, far-off cities, and historic events. It was only still pictures, not a moving film. Still, for some patrons, it might have been their first glimpse of the outside world.

In the 1930s, a census found the illiteracy rate among adults in eastern Kentucky was approximately 31%, much higher than the national average. For some patrons, a library visit consisted of a librarian coming to their cabin to read aloud from books, health guides, newspapers, and other materials. Many of these patrons were disabled coal miners who could not leave the cabin to read the news themselves. Before long, librarians were delivering new books biweekly to approximately 155 isolated one-room schools without libraries.

Mountain patrons weren’t averse to books, but their tastes weren’t exactly universal. They asked for the Bible, Mark Twain, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, and magazines such as Popular Mechanics. Urban novels that big-city publishers believed everyone craved had less appeal. It wasn’t that they didn’t want books. They did. They just wanted ones that reflected their own values and concerns, not those of New York in any given year.

In an open letter to the Louisville Courier-Journal, Maggie Mae Smith, WPA library supervisor for Whitley County, Kentucky, asked readers to give away any books they no longer wanted. She described the “starving minds” of some 7,600 rural school children in her district who had nothing to read. It was one of many such pleas that librarians sent to local and state newspapers when their new WPA wages turned out to be far from sufficient.

In 1936, Lena Nofcier, a Kentucky PTA leader, launched a statewide “Penny Fund Plan,” asking PTA members throughout the state to each contribute a penny. That fund, in turn, purchased new children’s books for the packhorse library routes. This was something the WPA could not provide because its workers received wages rather than supplies. It wasn’t much to ask, but collectively these pennies bought real, new books.

Because Kentucky was subject to the Jim Crow laws of racial segregation during that era, WPA administrators established separate library outposts and reading stations in segregated coal mining towns. The stations were staffed by African American literacy leaders who made certain that Black families and segregated schools had access to circulating books. These separate book delivery stations were not part of the routes used to serve the white community.

Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady, came to West Liberty, Kentucky, on May 24, 1937, to look over loaded saddlebags and speak with the packhorse librarians face-to-face. She never rode the routes herself, but she later wrote about the visit in her syndicated newspaper column “My Day.” People around the country sent book donations in response, elevating the local relief initiative to national prominence.

When World War II began to draw resources away from the projects, the project ended as President Roosevelt disbanded the WPA in 1943. For roughly eight years, the packhorse librarians had made 1.5 million contacts in 48 counties in Kentucky. Carl D. Perkins, who taught in a one-room schoolhouse in Knott County and relied on saddlebag deliveries himself, became a US Congressman. In 1956, he sponsored the Library Services Act, the nation’s first direct federal funding for public libraries.

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