The Story of the Vaughn Bay Public Library Association

One of the earliest public libraries was founded by the Ladies’ Library Association in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1852 by a group of “enterprising and intellectual ladies … for the purpose of social intercourse and mental improvement,” as the Kalamazoo Gazette reported. The Ann Arbor Library Association followed, organized by women in that city in 1866. 

In Washington, Ladies’ Library Associations promoting and starting free public libraries were first documented in Tacoma and Seattle, and even in the small town of Montesano, in the late 1880s; in Centralia in 1890; in Dayton, near Walla Walla, and in Aberdeen in 1891.

And in 1892, the enterprising and intellectual ladies of Vaughn Bay, many of them professionals who had lived in urban environments with public libraries, established the Vaughn Bay Public Library Association.

It was only the second organization founded in the bay, first settled by American emigrants barely eight years earlier in 1884. A few months earlier, in the fall of 1891, the fruit farmers in the bay, all of them men, had come together and organized the Vaughn Bay Horticultural Society, the first association of any kind on the remote and sparsely populated Key Peninsula. Now the women of the community had called a meeting to be held at the one-room log schoolhouse at the head of the bay in the afternoon of Feb. 13 “for the purpose of organizing a Public Library Association,” as Claribel Hoit, at 18 one of the youngest participants, recorded in her elegant cursive in the minutes.

It may have been billed as a business meeting, but it was probably also the first chance since the holidays for neighbors from near and far to catch up and socialize. It must have been a lively gathering; Hoit noted in the minutes that “at least one hour after the appointed time the house was called to order.”

The organizing got underway, and by the time the meeting adjourned, the Vaughn Bay Public Library Association had officially come into existence. A constitution and bylaws were debated and adopted, officers were elected, and committees appointed. Cornelia Hall, Vaughn’s schoolteacher, was elected librarian, a position she would hold for the next seven years. Hall may have also helped inspire the creation of a library in Vaughn. Born in Ann Arbor in 1847 and trained there as an English teacher, she had probably used and appreciated the city’s new public library, founded and run by the women of Ann Arbor.

Article II of the VBPLA’s charter stipulated that the officers and the committees, except for the advisory committee, were to be women living in Vaughn Bay. While the advisory committee was open to anyone, it would always be composed of men over the years. Membership in the library was free and open to anyone in Vaughn who contributed in any way to the success of the association.

It was a milestone in the history of the peninsula. Communities like Home, Longbranch, and even the small village of Herron would later have their own library associations, some started with the help of the VBPLA, but the Vaughn library showed the way, first among equals. The VBPLA also survived the longest and is linked indirectly to today’s Pierce County library in Key Center, established in 1982.

Headed by the newly elected president, Sara Bassett, the VBPLA’s executive committee, consisting of the association’s officers and committee chairs, quickly turned its attention to raising funds for the purchase of books “for the mutual development of its members.” The entertainment and musical committees got to work organizing fundraising events like ice cream socials, card games, and musical evenings held at the homes of VBPLA officers. The soliciting committee canvassed the community for cash contributions.

Book contributions were also welcome. On Thursday afternoon, Feb. 18, the executive committee met at the home of Cornelia Hall to get the books donated by the community that first week ready for the library. By the end of the month, 171 books had been contributed by the association’s members, and a committee was set up to select 100 titles to buy from a catalog provided by store owner and advisory committee member Harry Coblentz. According to the minutes from that meeting, books with larger type were to be preferred even though they were more expensive, because they were “more consistent to the greater class of readers,” suggesting an aging population. The secretary was directed to contact government agencies requesting free copies of agricultural and horticultural reports and other scientific literature.

At the VBPLA’s annual meeting a year later, in February 1893, the librarian reported that the number of books donated or purchased had more than doubled to 378. Thirty-five families had borrowed a total of 736 books that first year, for an average of 21 books per family. A book borrowed by one person, the librarian pointed out, was often read by several members of the family, multiplying the value of the library to the community.

Until a hall was built, the schoolhouse doubled as a library so students could be enlisted to help with circulation under Cornelia Hall’s supervision. Reference books were kept at the post office on the north shore of the bay so they could be consulted outside the Saturday-only library hours. Books were shelved in cabinets built by John Alverson, an early settler in 1884 who had also donated the land for the schoolhouse.

The subject of a library hall comes up for the first time indirectly in the minutes from October 1892. At that meeting, the board authorized borrowing money to buy books from the VBPLA’s P. H. (Public Hall) Fund. The loan would be repaid when the association “required or contemplated erecting such a hall.”

The executive committee discussed building a hall in more detail at its meeting in November 1892. The building would be “under the auspices and management entirely of the ladies of the VBPLA.” Its doors would be open “for all legitimate purposes,” and it would be free “to all religious denominations regardless of sectarian principles.”

Site selection and fundraising committees were appointed at the May 1893 meeting. Further discussion was deferred until a site had been selected and “until the busy season was nearly over to suit the convenience of the members.”

By that fall, Harry and Julia Coblentz had offered to carve out and deed a small section at the east end of their property to the VBPLA for the future library hall. Title would be held by the VBPLA’s trustees for as long as the association remained in existence. At a special meeting of the membership Dec. 28, 1893, the VBPLA accepted the donation and adopted a series of resolutions regarding the construction and use of the hall.

And in March 1894, two years after the VBPLA was formed, the Vaughn Bay Public Library Hall, “prettily decorated and festooned with flags,” as the Tacoma Daily Ledger reported, opened to the public. The celebration included speeches, the raffle of a quilt made by the community’s young women to raise money for the building fund, and a dance later in the evening where over 100 young people participated.

The hall was designed by VBPLA advisory committee member Henry Smith Fogg, who had homesteaded with his family in south Vaughn in 1888. Fogg was also the principal worker, helped by volunteer labor from the community. The unknown author of a brief history of the VBPLA in 1926 reminisced that “farmers and fishermen and lumbermen turned into carpenters” to help with construction, using lumber cut at Alfred Van Slyke’s sawmill a few hundred yards away. Over 130 years later, the building still stands, restored by the Key Peninsula Historical Society, primarily with volunteer labor from members of the community.

The hall and the library became treasured community assets for decades to come. Monies raised from renting the space over the years went toward the purchase of books, whose number had grown to 1,800 by 1921, and repairs or improvements to the hall. As the author of the 1926 history noted, “No penny’s worth of debt was ever allowed to exist against the building.” When money was in short supply, as it almost always was, book purchases were always funded first. Building projects were deferred until money was raised or material donated. Volunteer labor was almost always offered.

Until the 1940s, the VBPLA relied exclusively on the generosity of the community. In 1944, following an enabling act passed by the state legislature two years earlier, voters in rural Pierce County approved a ballot measure establishing the Pierce County Rural Library District. 

The VBPLA would be among the first to benefit from the new program.

This history feature is Part 1 of a two-part series. Read Part 2 here.