Jim Scheppke | The Origins of the Oregon State Library | Oregon Historical Quarterly, 107.1

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The Origins of the Oregon State Library

by Jim Scheppke

THE FIRST OREGON STATE Librarian, Cornelia Marvin Pierce, had at least two occasions to publicly reflect on the origins of the Oregon State Library. Both times, she began the story with her arrival in Oregon in August 1905. In her 1928 "resignation message," under the heading "Library Beginnings," Pierce wrote:

May I remind you that it was on August 1, 1905, I began my library service in Oregon, with a clear field, large opportunity, and two thousand dollars a year to be devoted to the cause of library development in a state with no state library except a law library, no free books available for any person in Oregon except for those fortunate ones who lived in Portland, Salem, and Eugene, and only one of these maintained a tax-supported library?¹

The other occasion was a speech written by Pierce that was read at the dedication of the State Library Building on April 3, 1939. Once again, Pierce had little to say about the events that brought her to Oregon, but she did pause in recounting her many accomplishments "to recall the names and contributions of those who fought by my side," most notably her late friend and professional colleague, Mary Frances Isom. She described Isom as a "gifted Librarian of the Portland Library, an associate whose generous nature urged her to serve beyond the borders of her own library territory, and to whose eager advocacy of the library cause Oregon is most greatly indebted." Later in the speech, Pierce returned to her theme that library development in Oregon was something for which she and her associates had to fight. In summing up her career at the State Library, Pierce quoted Theodore Roosevelt: "The noblest sport this world affords is aggressive fighting for a great cause."² In the eleven biennial reports that Pierce wrote, beginning in 1907, she conveyed an image of herself as a heroic figure much like Roosevelt, fighting alone against great odds to establish library services for Oregonians.

Although I do not wish to diminish Pierce's considerable achievements, the fact is that a number of clear historic trends converged in Oregon in 1905 and led to the establishment and success of the Oregon Library Commission, today's Oregon State Library. Oregon was one of twenty-six states that established state library commissions to lead the development of public and school libraries between 1895 and 1910.³

The back of this photo of the Oregon State Library Circulation desk, circa 1920, reads: "... desk for local loans to farmers of Polk and Marion County and people who have no public libraries. Oregon State Library, Supreme Court Building, Salem. Seated at the local charging desk is Clara Van Sant. At her immediate left in light colored dress is Miss Mirpah Blair...."

Published with permission of the Oregon State Library

BEFORE TRACING THESE ORIGINS, however, it might be best to start with the other "Oregon State Library," which had its beginnings in 1850 and, confusingly, bears little relation to the Oregon State Library that celebrated its centennial in 2005. This earlier Oregon State Library began as the Territorial Library. It was the "law library" that Pierce dismissively referred to in her 1928 resignation message. In the act that enabled the Oregon Territory, passed on August 14, 1848, Congress appropriated five thousand dollars for a library to be maintained at Oregon City, the seat of the territorial government. An initial two-thousand-dollar book purchase was made in New York City in 1849 by newly appointed territorial Governor Joseph Lane. Governor Lane's successor, John Gaines, purchased the remaining three thousand dollars worth of books and maps in 1852.⁴ The collection included mostly law books but also books dealing with politics, education, history, and agriculture.

The library was not organized until 1850, when the territorial legislature provided funding for and appointed a state librarian. In 1851, the legislature passed an amendment requiring that it elect a state librarian annually.⁵ That same year, the state capital, including the library, was moved to Salem. During the week after Christmas 1855, the Capitol building was destroyed in a fire and, along with it, the entire library collection except for the few books that were checked out.

The 1856 legislature asked Congress for an appropriation of twenty thousand dollars to replace the Territorial Library collection, but Congress appropriated only five hundred dollars. With this small amount of money, a sparse law library was reestablished. After Oregon achieved statehood in 1859, the library continued to struggle for resources. In his 1872 biennial report, the state librarian described the library as "one of the most constantly and consistently neglected institutions of the state — inferior to the library of many respectable villages in the eastern states."

The library remained in this situation throughout the nineteenth century. It should be noted, however, that according to the 1876 United States Bureau of Education Report, Public Libraries in the United States of America, the Oregon State Library's 5,257 volumes constituted the second largest collection of any library in the state.⁶ Most of the other eleven public libraries — not private subscription libraries or libraries in private homes — had only a few hundred volumes in 1876. Regardless, the nineteenth-century Oregon State Library continued to lack an adequate budget and collection until well into the twentieth century.

In her 1939 speech at the dedication of the State Library Building, Cornelia Marvin Pierce described how the present Oregon State Library appropriated the name of the nineteenth-century Oregon State Library. Ever the fighter, Pierce recalled "finally winning the name Oregon State Library" for the Oregon Library Commission. On June 3, 1913, the legislature passed a bill to create the Supreme Court Library, under the direction of the Oregon Supreme Court, including all of the law books and legal reference materials of the former Oregon State Library.

The bill also provided for the transfer of the general collection and the documents collection to the Oregon Library Commission (which formed in 1905) and directed that the commission be renamed the Oregon State Library. By that time, the law library, as Pierce referred to it, included forty thousand volumes of general nonfiction books in addition to the legal reference collection and state and federal documents. The transfer occurred in February 1914, and both libraries took up quarters in the new Supreme Court Building, with the new Oregon State Library on the first floor and the Supreme Court Library on the second.⁷

The only significant connection between today's State Library and the nineteenth-century State Library, besides the name, is what remains of the collection that was transferred in 1914. The Supreme Court Library is known today as the State of Oregon Law Library. The primary mission of the Territorial Library as a legal and reference library for the judicial and legislative branches is still a core part of the mission of the State of Oregon Law Library.

The origins of today's State Library are not to be found in its nineteenth-century namesake, but in the Oregon Library Commission. To understand the significance of that body's establishment — of the fight to which Pierce referred in her speech — we must look at the evolution of state library services in other states, where we will find that Oregon followed a well-trodden path.

Cornelia Marvin Pierce is pictured here in 1905, the year she came to the Oregon State Library.

Published with permission of the Oregon State Library

IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, many states had state libraries that bore a strong resemblance to Oregon's. They were primarily legal collections that served state assemblies, other elected officials, and the courts. The histories of state libraries in places such as South Carolina, Virginia, and Pennsylvania can be traced back to colonial times. Until they were consolidated in 1816, three state libraries in Pennsylvania served the executive branch, the House of Representatives, and the Senate.

These early state libraries were most active in collecting statutes passed by other states. In 1811, Massachusetts led an effort to begin a system of exchange of state statutes, and, in 1813, Congress passed the first law directing that free copies of federal laws, journals, and documents be distributed to each state. This helped stimulate the establishment of new state libraries in states such as Ohio (1817), New York (1818), Indiana (1825), and Michigan (1828). Library historian Wayne Wiegand summarizes the condition of state libraries by the end of the Civil War:

Generally, collections were inadequately supported, haphazardly housed, infrequently used, and grew mostly through gift and exchange. They were managed (often indifferently) from the Secretary of State's office, and usually served state officials only. State libraries were indeed state supported, but their use was not state mandated, and since no one could prove that the government or general welfare of one state was better than another because the former had a superior state library, officials in charge of these agencies had difficulty finding a persuasive argument for increased appropriations.⁸

Wiegand is especially critical of the leaders of nineteenth-century state libraries. These people were usually untrained, unqualified political appointees who were satisfied to maintain the limited aims of their libraries — to collect mostly free legal research materials and federal documents.

A different kind of leader came to the New York State Library in 1889 and began to transform it into a model of what state libraries in other states, including Oregon, would become in the early twentieth century. Melvil Dewey probably stands as the greatest American librarian in history. Although he is generally known for the decimal classification system that is still used in most public and school libraries, the long list of Dewey's innovations also includes the conceptualization of the state library as the agency best suited to organize the development of school and public library services within a state.

Dewey's invention of this concept — now known as "library development services" — can only be understood in the context of the broader public library movement that began throughout New England in the mid-nineteenth century, most notably in the Boston Public Library's founding in 1848. At the time, many states were establishing tax-supported public schools and passing compulsory school attendance laws. Public libraries were seen as a logical extension of the public school system; they would be a "people's university" where anyone could continue his or her education after completing public school.

This new idea that all citizens should be provided with a tax-supported public library was widely accepted, at least in the Northeast, by the time Dewey began to develop the New York State Library in accordance with his vision. He had created the nation's first library school at Columbia College, which he later moved to the New York State Library. Students were mostly young and female, because Dewey believed that college-educated women had the "right character" for librarianship and could be hired at a lower cost than men.

At the New York State Library, he broadened the collections so they could be shared with developing libraries in his state, collecting books in the health sciences, children's literature, and even for a "Women's Library." In 1893, he pioneered "traveling libraries," collections of one hundred general-interest books packed into specially made wooden crates that were rotated among small towns and rural areas. Their purpose was to satisfy the need and stimulate the desire for reading materials until local public libraries could be established.⁹ A little over a decade later, traveling libraries became a major service of the Oregon Library Commission.

Mail order packages are prepared and weighed for shipment and traveling libraries readied to ship by freight and by parcel post at the Oregon State Library, circa 1920. Myrtle Richardson (in foreground) and Delight Evans (at rear) are mailing books to borrowers.

Published with permission of the Oregon State Library

Dewey tried to interest other state librarians in his library development efforts but had little success. In 1889, he invited his colleagues to the American Library Association Conference in St. Louis. Only nine state librarians attended the meeting. Nevertheless, Dewey was successful in having them agree to establish the National Association of State Librarians, of which he was the first president.

The association, however, turned out to be ineffectual; in 1898, Dewey complained to a library colleague that "most of our state librarians are asleep."¹⁰ Most political appointees who ran state libraries in the late nineteenth century were uninterested in expanding their role to serve in the vanguard of their states' public library movements. Their constituents were legislators, judges, and other elected officials, most of whom were indifferent to the public-library movement. The movement was championed by school officials, women's clubs affiliated with the General Federation of Women's Clubs, and assorted educated elites.¹¹ Many of the elite were active in local subscription libraries.

A solution to the problem of indifferent state librarians emerged at the end of the nineteenth century: if most state librarians could not be persuaded to lead the public-library movement in their states, then it would be necessary to create another state agency to do so, an agency run by a commission of citizens and officials committed to the cause. Wisconsin was one of the first states to adopt this solution in 1895, when the legislature created the Wisconsin Free Library Commission.¹² The new commission followed the service model developed by Melvil Dewey in New York. It provided library training, gave advice to local organizers who worked with city councils to establish free (tax-supported) libraries, and sent out traveling libraries — usually to smaller towns and rural communities — to stimulate interest in libraries.

Like other western states, Oregon followed much the same evolution of public library services as midwestern and eastern states had a few decades earlier. Oregonians formed a number of subscription libraries, some of which came and went, such as the Multnomah Circulating Library at Oregon City. Considered by Mirpah Blair to be the first subscription library in Oregon, this library formed in 1840 but seems to have disbanded prior to 1860.¹³

Portland's most successful subscription library, the Portland Library Association, was founded in 1864. Although it, too, had to weather financial problems in its early years, by 1895 the library was located in its own $150,000 building in downtown Portland. Six prominent Portlanders endowed the library with an operating endowment of $50,000 and the Association raised a collections endowment of $25,250 from $250 life memberships paid by 101 Portland families. A more humble library, called the Portland Public Library, was established in the last decades of the nineteenth century as a low-cost subscription library and eventually came to occupy a room at Portland City Hall. According to Wilbur Rowe, this library began as a sailors' reading room founded by a Unitarian minister on Burnside Street. It was later supported by subscriptions, but Rowe referred to it as "free" by the time it became the Portland Public Library in City Hall.¹⁴ But in the 1890s, Oregon still lacked a public library law that would enable cities to establish tax-supported public libraries that could remain free.

The Portland Women's Club led the way in Oregon. Under the leadership of Sarah A. Evans, the club worked with state Representative George Hill to introduce legislation in the 1899 Oregon Legislative Assembly, but the bill was never given a hearing. Undeterred, on October 24, 1899, the Portland Women's Club met with thirteen women's clubs from around the state to organize broad support for public-library legislation in Oregon.¹⁵

The Library Committee of the newly formed Oregon Federation of Women's Clubs worked with Dr. Joseph Schafer, a new member of the history faculty at the University of Oregon who had been active in the public-library movement in his native state of Wisconsin. Shafer may have suggested that Wisconsin's library commission was a model of the best practices in library development. He sent the committee a pamphlet, "Why I Approve of a Free Library," which explained the value of free public libraries and contained endorsements from twenty "nationally prominent men." The Library Committee reprinted the pamphlet, sent a copy to each member of the legislature, and by the time the 1901 legislature convened, the Library Committee obtained pledges from many legislators to support enabling legislation for public libraries.

The Federation also approved a budget of fifty dollars to support Sarah Evans and another Federation member, Mrs. A. H. Brayman of Salem, to lobby for the bill at the state capitol.¹⁶ As Wilbur Rowe wrote in his invaluable history of the Oregon State Library from its beginnings until 1938:

After the legislators were assured that the library bill had nothing to do with women's suffrage, it was passed, February 13, 1901, with only two votes against it. The bill was signed ... and sent to Mrs. Evans and Mrs. Brayman, who took it to Portland where they presented it, in triumph, at the Women's club meeting the following day. It is interesting to note that they returned about half the traveling expenses voted from the treasury for their stay in Salem.¹⁷

After the public-library bill passed, the City of Portland wasted no time. On July 18, 1901, it used the new law to approve a property tax equivalent to twenty cents per one thousand dollars of assessed valuation. The income was used to contract with the Portland Library Association — which had merged with the Portland Public Library in 1900 — so that the former subscription library could be made free and available to anyone in Portland. This was a major victory for proponents of free public libraries, but Oregon was still without a commission that would coordinate efforts to build a statewide library system.

In 1901, when the first public-library law in Oregon passed and the first public library was formed under that law, the person most responsible for creating the Oregon Library Commission, Mary Frances Isom, arrived in Oregon. The thirty-six-year-old librarian had a degree from Wellesley College, had received library training at the Pratt Institute, and had worked briefly at the Cleveland Public Library before she was hired by the Portland Library Association as a cataloger.¹⁸ Once she arrived in Portland, Isom's considerable talents became evident and she was soon made director of the Portland Public Library. But her vision for library service extended far beyond Portland's city limits. She was determined that her library serve all of Multnomah County, but the 1901 public library law only provided for city-supported libraries. In the next legislative session (1903), Isom led an effort to amend the law to allow a county library to be formed in Multnomah County. Soon thereafter the Portland Public Library became one of only four county libraries in the United States.¹⁹

Mary Frances Isom is largely responsible for the creation of the Oregon State Library Commission.

OHS neg., OrHi 72426

Isom believed deeply in the ideal of the public-library movement, that public-library services were for everyone, not just for affluent city dwellers. In the September 1902 issue of the Women's Club Journal, Isom wrote: "Let us not rest until every town and village in Oregon has its free public library as well as its free public school." In her first annual report to the Portland Library Association, she made clear what was needed to realize that statewide vision:

It is not within the province of this library to undertake such state work ... but is it not fitting, as the only free library in the State, that we should use our active influence to bring such an organization, properly equipped with a trained library organizer at its head, whose work should be to encourage libraries already started, to establish new ones, and to answer fully the many demands which come to this library and which we must often neglect in part or refuse entirely because our hands are tied?²⁰

By 1904, Oregon's public library law was beginning to stimulate the development of public libraries in major cities such as Salem and Eugene, but, as Isom noted, communities around the state lacked the support necessary to meet the demand for public libraries. To fill that need, Isom herself drafted House Bill 6, which was modeled closely after statutes that had created the Wisconsin Free Library Commission in 1895. The mission of the Oregon Library Commission would be to "give advice to all schools, free and other public libraries, and to all communities which may propose to establish them, as to the best means of establishing and maintaining such libraries, the selection of books, cataloguing and other details of library management."²¹

The commission would also provide traveling libraries to stimulate interest in public-library development. With support from the Oregon Federation of Women's Clubs, H.B. 6 passed easily, and Governor George Chamberlain signed it into law by February 1905.

Isom had visited the Wisconsin Free Library Commission in 1904 to see firsthand the work of the agency that was to provide the model for Oregon's commission. In April 1905, when Isom was appointed to the new Oregon Library Commission and appointed, with one other member, to recommend the first "Secretary" of the commission, she wrote Cornelia Marvin, a six-year employee of the Wisconsin Free Library Commission, asking "Miss Marvin" if she could recommend someone for the new position in Oregon. She wrote:

The duties are enumerated in the bill ... [they are] the usual ones and the field is before one and to my thinking most promising — nothing has been done [and] everything is to do.... The success of the Commission will rest upon her shoulders — I should like to duplicate Miss Marvin if that were possible....²²

Isom must have been pleased when, in reply, Marvin recommended herself for the position.

At Isom's recommendation, Marvin received her appointment on May 25, 1905, at the second meeting of the new Oregon Library Commission. In addition to Isom, the other four members were the governor, the superintendent of public instruction, the president of the University of Oregon, and a citizen appointed by the governor. Isom served on the commission for fifteen years, until her death in 1920.

The origins of the Oregon State Library tend to be obscured by the accounts written by its first librarian, Cornelia Marvin Pierce, and by confusion over the quite different Oregon State Library that existed in the nineteenth century. In fact, the development of the Oregon State Library followed a similar evolution that, by 1905, had already occurred in many other states. What drove this evolution was the public-library movement, led primarily by determined women who believed in the educational value of public-library service for everyone. In Oregon, the Oregon Federation of Women's Clubs provided the spark that led to the first public libraries in 1901 and, not long thereafter, to the establishment of a state agency to serve as the catalyst for the development of a statewide public library system.

It was Oregon's great fortune that, in addition to the voluntary efforts of Women's Clubs and other citizens, two remarkable librarians who were very similar in their energy and their vision chose to come to Oregon in the first decade of the twentieth century to bring public library service to "every town and village" and to isolated farms and ranches in every corner of the state. Mary Frances Isom and Cornelia Marvin Pierce, more than any other individuals, deserve our lasting gratitude for their work in laying the foundation for public libraries in Oregon.

Notes

This history was originally written on the occasion of the celebration of the State Library Centennial, January 27, 2005.

^1. Cornelia Marvin Pierce, The Oregon State Library and its Book Service to the People of Oregon, Being the Eleventh Biennial Report, October 1, 1926, to September 30, 1928, and Resignation Message to Its Patrons of the State Librarian — Cornelia Marvin (Salem: Oregon State Library 1928), 3.

^2. Cornelia Marvin Pierce, "Dedication of the Oregon Library Building April 8, 1939, Message from Cornelia Marvin Pierce," Special Collections, Oregon State Library, Salem, SPECCOLL or li 2d36, 2, 4.

^3. Wayne A. Wiegand, "The Historical Development of State Library Agencies," in State Library Services and Issues: Facing Future Challenges, ed, Charles R. McClure (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Publishing Co., 1986), 7–8.

^4. Mirpah G. Blair, "Some Early Libraries of Oregon," Washington Historical Quarterly 17:4 (October 1926): 267–8.

^5. Wilbur D. Rowe, The Development of the Oregon State Library and its Contribution to the Public Schools (M.A. thesis, University of Oregon 1939), 5, 6.

^6. Ibid., 7, 10. Pacific University in Forest Grove had the largest collection in 1876, with 5,500 volumes.

^7. Ibid, 61–2.

^8. Wiegand, "Historical Development," 2–4.

^9. Wayne A. Wiegand, Irrepressible Reformer (Chicago: American Library Association 1996), 85, 198–9.

^10. Wiegand, "Historical Development," 6.

^11. The General Federation of Women's Clubs was founded in 1890 in New York to enable various women's clubs to come together at the local, state and national levels for community improvement efforts.

^12. Five years earlier, Massachusetts had created a library commission, but Wiegand argues that this first commission was atypical, since Massachusetts' libraries were already well-developed. It was the Wisconsin Free Library Commission that pioneered the model of library development for rural Western and Midwestern states that had yet to develop their library systems.

^13. Blair, "Some Early Libraries of Oregon," 259–262.

^14. Mrs. L. W. Sitton, Henry Failing, H. W. Corbett, S. G. Read, C. H. Lewis, and E. S. Kearney provided the original endowment. Rowe, The Development, 16–7.

^15. The GFWC Oregon Federation of Women's Clubs, "History," http://www.gfwc-ofwc.org/History.htm.

^16. Rowe, The Development, 20–2.

^17. Ibid, 22.

^18. Ibid, 25–26.

^19. Harriet Catherine Long, County Library Service (Chicago: American Library Association 1925), 20–23.

^20. Rowe, The Development, 26–7.

^21. General Laws of Oregon, 1905, Chapter 44.

^22. Melissa Ann Brisley, "Cornelia Marvin Pierce: Pioneer in Library Extension," Library Quarterly 38:2 (April 1968): 135.

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