Lou’s View – March 10, 2016
The First Librarian
by Lou Bernard
For March, I’m writing about local women. And, if I can, I’ve got to get in a plug for the Ross Library. The library’s been around since 1910, when the city finally decided to accept the gift of Annie Halenbake Ross, who had died in 1907 and left her home to be made into Lock Haven’s first free public library.
But I’m not writing about Annie Halenbake Ross.
Great woman. Buried in Highland Cemetery, and definitely part of the fabric of our community. But not the subject of my column, this week.
This week, I want to write about Anne V. Taggart.
This will be somewhat of a challenge, as I have minimal information on her. But that’s never stopped me before. If I start admitting I don’t have enough information to write an eight hundred word column, I might have to go and find a real job, and nobody wants that.
The library first opened on Thanksgiving Day of 1910, under the direction of the first Board President, Wilson Kistler. Obviously, if you have a library, you need someone to run it. In Lock Haven’s case, this turned out to be Anne V. Taggart, the first head librarian that the Ross Library ever had.
Anne V. Taggart was born in 1882 in Wilson, New York, the youngest of three children and the only girl. Taggart was referred to as “charming” when she was initially hired by the board. The newspaper mentioned what a find she was, and how lucky Lock Haven was to have her. She was a graduate of the Pratt Institute, one of the three largest training schools in library science at the time.
In those days, the head librarian lived on the premises, in a room upstairs. I’m pretty sure it’s the room our director now uses as her office. There was an assistant librarian, too, but she was allowed to go home. The assistant was Annie Mitchell, because in those days you apparently had to have a name that matched your library name. So Taggart and Mitchell were a team, working together to run the library in its early days.
On opening day, they made a big event out of it. Both Annies had gone all out. A newspaper article from the time said,”Under the supervision of Miss Taggart, the librarian, and Miss Annie Mitchell, her assistant, the interior of the library was prettily decorated with palms and greens, the artistic Thanksgiving bulletins giving bright and colorful touches to the few bare wall spaces here and there.”
The library staff, all both of them, were having a busy afternoon for the event. The board of directors was acting as a welcoming committee, and the paper said,”They were gracefully assisted by Miss Taggart and Miss Mitchell.”
Taggart had some artistic ability, too, designing the library bulletins by hand. With the help of Mitchell and two other volunteers, she’d catalogued all the books, logging them into the card file and making sure each one was accounted for. She had some plans for the direction she wanted the library to go in, as well—The newspaper read,”Miss Taggart has also been assisted in her work of opening the library and marking the books by Miss Eckert and Miss Murphy, and both have done their work in a neat and painstaking manner, directed by Miss Taggart, who has proven herself a young woman well trained in library science, especially adapted to her chosen work and destined to popularize the Ross Library. Her aim is to reach all classes of readers and she has special plans, which she will gradually unfold as the work progresses, which are sure to attract readers from every walk of life.”
Sadly, we didn’t get to keep Anne Taggart around for very long. She ran the Ross Library for about a year. Then she left for a new job in Grand Rapids, Michigan, running the public library there. She was replaced by Florence Hulings, the Ross Library’s second head librarian. I can tell that Taggart lasted at least four years in Michigan, because in 1915, Helen Mason of the Central State Normal School library announced that she was going off to Michigan to join Taggart there.
I haven’t been able to find out what happened to Anne Taggart. I mean, since she was working here in 1910, it’s a fair bet that she’s in a cemetery someplace, but I haven’t found any record of it yet. She does have her name on a plaque in the lobby of the Ross Library, though—The one who really started it all.
