Reading my Grandmother - the Fairy Glen Library

When you start asking questions about your family history, all kinds of fascinating facts come forward. Such as…

There was a library in the tiny hamlet of Fairy Glen, though not when my grandmother was a girl. She had left home before it was established in my great-grandmother’s living room, around 1928. One of my uncles described it to me as shelves against the end wall, maybe 12 feet long by 8 feet high, crammed with fiction – mostly westerns – and non-fiction. The library even had a name: Aurora Borealis. 

(My library looks pretty much the same... more board feet of shelving... but all the books in it belong to us, and we just call it the 'living room')

The sign-out record at Aurora Borealis was a ledger with columns labeled by hand:  title/date/person taking/date returned. In a community of less than 200 people, that was sufficient. The librarian - even when she was not your own grandmother - knew not only you, but your mother, father, siblings, and extended family. She not only knew your phone number (if you had one) and your class at the only school, but she would likely see you at least once a week in company with your parents, teachers, friends, and other people who would frown alarmingly (if they did nothing worse) to find you had abused the privilege of using the library. 

My uncle made a few phone calls and traced the movements of the library: beginning at his grandmother's house around the time the railroad and grain elevators came to Fairy Glen, it moved to Mrs. Ronning, who also had the post office. After World War 2, Mrs. Ronning's boys came home to a dearth of local jobs and she moved away with them, sending the post office to a neighbour, Red Glover, and the library to the schoolhouse, which had been expanded well beyond its one room by then due to an influx of families forced off their farms during the Great Depression. Sad to say, when the Fairy Glen school was amalgamated into the Melfort school unit, the building and contents were essentially abandoned. After some incidents of vandalism, a former teacher rescued a few boxes of books, the last remnants of a pioneer initiative that encouraged reading and the acquisition of knowledge in that isolated farming community for several decades.

My first concrete link to my Scottish-Canadian grandmother’s reading habits has also turned up: my mother remembers that her mother was awarded a book while she attended that original one-room schoolhouse. She read it many times and kept it in her private trunk all her long, long life. The book was Gene Stratton Porter’s Girl of the Limberlost.

This book has been in print since 1909, and my local library (Alexander Calhoun Branch, Calgary Public Library) sent me over a copy within two days of my requesting it. I LOVE my local library!

My uncle remembers my grandmother had 4-5 girls books inscribed with ‘for First in Class’, and suggested I look for ‘Girls of the True Blue’. This book was one of around 300 written or co-written by L.T. Meade in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s (she died in 1914). 

Sadly, this particular title is not available either at my library or on Project Gutenberg. Doubly sad because, as an Irish-born author, L.T. Meade could well have been on my English grandmother’s childhood reading list as well.Gutenberg has numerous titles available, though, so until I get more specific information, I can taste-test the books and get the flavour of both my grandmothers' girlhood reading options.

This weekend, though, I will open 'A Girl of the Limberlost' and experience for the first time a book that I know was a vital part of my Fairy Glen grandmother’s reading life. One small connection is made.

Reading My Grandmothers - Library history

A smidge of library history for you:

The first library at Melfort, Saskatchewan to which my Scottish-Canadian grandmother would have had access was opened in 1928, by which time she was 24 years old, married, with two babies. Even if she hadn't had babies and farm work to contend with, Melfort was 26 km from Fairy Glen (where her school was), and even further from her farm.

Current Melfort librarian Penny Markland wrote me about that first library:

Rules about the use of the library were rather more stringent than they are today.  Members were to have no more than 1 book at a time for no longer than 2 weeks.  Those with overdue books were strictly dealt with, being expelled from library membership after the 3^rd offense!   In 1932 the librarian’s salary was $120.00 per year.  $51.84 was spent on books that year.   I don’t think children were necessarily allowed in the library back then, although I’m not totally sure.

Isn't that last bit fascinating - and scary - when we consider how many children nowadays learn to love books and become lifetime readers because of free storytimes at the local library?

Not that the library looked like a particularly child-friendly place anyway. It was on the second floor of the post office, though, so at least it was centrally located for anyone who did get into town once a week from the surrounding countryside and villages.

This is the new library:

 

It has all the services we take for granted nowadays: not only books and magazines but computers with Internet access, storytimes, kids' crafts, book clubs, classes for all ages, general interest programs and specialty guest speakers.

The one thing that hasn't changed, I bet, is that the librarians still do their darnedest to encourage children to explore the boundless worlds between the covers of books.

Reading My Grandmothers

Part One:

I don't actually know what my grandmothers read when they were girls, or adults. If I saw either of them more than a handful of times in my life, I don't remember. We were, and are, a peripatetic family with scant overlaps between geography and generation. To help me understand the influences that shaped my grandmothers, I want to read books that they might have read, see words and learn stories that might have helped shape them as my childhood reading shaped me.. But figuring out what those books are could be difficult.

Although I've sought out some 'early' books for children, such as E. Nesbit and Lucy Maude Montgomery, I'm not at all sure I've covered anything either of my grandmothers would have read. My godmother, the youngest daughter of my English grandmother, sent me my first copies of Little Women, Five Little Peppers, and Heidi, though, so maybe I have, without realizing it, joined a century-long chain of women related by both blood and books. But how would I know?

What books did they learn first to read? To what books did they turn for escape? What information do I have as a starting point?

One grandmother died when I was a child, not quite before I learned to read but long before I began to wonder what other people were reading. She was born in 1892 in England; in middle age, after World War 2, she immigrated to Canada, living mainly in small towns around the Prairies and eventually dying in northern Alberta. When I was around ten years old, she came to visit for several weeks; I felt I knew her after that but she died not many months later. It was impractical to take me along to her funeral, half a country away. Any books among her deathbed possessions were dispersed.

My other grandmother, born in 1904, lived well into my adulthood but I hardly knew her. Most of her life was spent in the same farmhouse, only a few miles from the land on which her father settled a farm. As a farm wife looking after a large family, garden and livestock, she likely had little time for reading. During our rare visits I never saw her with a book in her hands. The only ones I ever found in her house were mainstream novels from the 1950's, left behind from my mother's adolescence. Not that reading Pearl S. Buck wasn't a gateway to a wider world, but it did not leave any connections to that grandmother.

My grandmothers' childhood reading was unlikely to have covered all the same books, or maybe any at all, due to geography and patterns of human settlement.

My English grandmother attended a school in Hammersmith, which by then was functionally part of the city of London, England. Her immediate environs had been continuously settled for hundreds of years and contained any number of well-staffed schools for both boys and girls, many purpose-built of stone and brick construction, as well as lending libraries, bookstores, and a substantially literate population.

My Scottish-Canadian grandmother went to a new-built one-room schoolhouse, isolated on the prairies near Melfort, Saskatchewan. Melfort at the time had a population of around five hundred people, including a fair number of older settlers whose literacy was limited to the signing of their name. The school would have had maybe twenty students. Her first teacher was a Mr. John Houston. Although I cannot say with any certainty that he never expanded his pupils' reading opportunities beyond the provided textbooks, it is unlikely he was well versed in the current state of literature for girls.

 This question needs more exploration. When I have some likely titles in hand, or possibly just some concrete information from the surviving children of those deceased grandmothers, I'll post on this subject again.