Arlington Heights Stories: The birth of a library

On Jan. 16, 1887, in the new village of Arlington Heights, a group of local women created the Ladies Reading Circle.

Following the “Chautauqua Course of Home Reading,” they agreed to meet once a week and discuss their selected books. The number of members jumped from six to 58 in three years and the sheer volume of books filling the home of Mrs. John J. Dietrich became the heart of the first lending library.

Eventually, more than 150 books were moved to the clapboard house of Effie and Lucy Shepherd, who became caretakers of the collection. Over 14 years, the number grew to 750 titles. Small cash gifts came from residents and went toward restoring torn pages, sewing bindings and any maintenance needed to keep the books in circulation.

And still more books were added until, in 1909, the members carted the lot to a small room in the North School on St. James Street. This library windfall lured schoolchildren into the pages and pages of thoughts and ideas, into poetry and the thunder of great literature, and to places and peoples far beyond the village cornfields and buggy roads.

After 18 years, the upper floor of the former Village Hall, at 101 W. Davis St., became the library’s next home and finally had a name, the “Arlington Heights Community Library.” The gypsy nature of this growing institution was coming to an end.

Now, serious fundraisers had joined the project to end the peripatetic perambulations of the village book collection. When a plan fell through to house it in the new municipal building, the books were being displayed in orange crates and piles for want of shelving.

The village needed its own library building. A door to door campaign to raise $80,000, added to the $25,000 raised by the Veterans of Foreign Wars to honor war veterans, finally pushed it over the top.

Finally, enough money was available to build a “memorial” library at 112 N. Belmont that opened on June 28, 1952.

As the library expanded beyond simply lending books, it became a center of village intellectual and creative life. Soon, however, the Belmont building was stretched at the seams and on too small a lot to expand.

Once again the planners began looking for a piece of ground and ideas for a structure that could grow with the needs of the residents, students and businesses filling this expanding community.

Hopefully for the last time, the village treasure of knowledge was packed up in June 1968 and was trucked by volunteers to a new award-winning library building. From its beginning in a clapboard cottage to opening day, June 3, 1969, the Arlington Heights Memorial Library has been a grass roots project pushed along by hundreds of volunteers.

@$ID/NormalParagraphStyle: Daisy Paddock Daniels, Prairieville, USA, Arlington Heights Historical Society, 1971

The spirit of Effie and Lucy and the Ladies Reading Circle continues with the premise that great ideas and creative thoughts must be shared.