Librarians on Horseback

In 1935, over 60 percent of Kentucky’s population had no access to libraries. Enter the Pack Horse Library Project, a New Deal program that put reading material, including handmade scrapbooks filled with parts of books, magazines, and pamphlets, into the hands of local residents. As Kirsten Chervenak reports for Oxford American, the project was a critical way to share information among people with limited resources living in rural areas of the state.

Many donated items were old or in disrepair. Magazines in particular were worn, with pieces or whole pages torn out. In response to inadequate funding and such high demand for books, librarians tried to avoid throwing anything away. Rather, they salvaged unusable items by creating scrapbooks. Because these volumes were assembled by the librarians themselves, the content could be curated to include what was most valued or requested by their patrons. A manual written for WPA Pack Horse Library projects by Philip R. Blodgett says of the scrapbooks, “Make them according to demand, always trying to answer the questions most frequently asked.”

Librarians made scrapbooks dedicated to recipes, quilting patterns, foraging advice, nature photos, Bible stories, hygiene instructions, and more. Library patrons were inspired: they, too, had knowledge they wanted to share. Women began giving recipes and quilting patterns to librarians for inclusion; others created scrapbooks themselves for librarians to circulate throughout the community.