WPA Pake Horse Library in Lee County

The pack horse library was a WPA project and it ran in eastern Kentucky from 1936 to 1943. Each county office had a supervisor and four or five mounted carriers who rode three or four routes a week, around eighteen miles a day, for twenty eight dollars a month. By the spring of 1938 the riders were covering roughly thirty counties and better than 5,000 miles a month between them, reaching over 4,000 families and 55,000 people. A reader got one book at a time, three to a family, for two weeks. 

 

One of the Lee County carriers was Grace Lucas. She was raising two children by herself and had been working a WPA sewing project when the library came in. "I had to make a living for them," she said. She owned no horse, so she hired Bill, a big chestnut gelding, for fifty cents a week plus his feed. She left at daybreak to be finished before dark and got down and led him over the steep rocky stretches. In winter the creek water froze her feet to the stirrups, and in spring the fords came up to her saddlebags. One night she was caught in an all night rain and slept at a house on her route. A family with almost nothing insisted on feeding her a meal every time she came, and she worried the whole while that she was taking food out of the children's mouths.

 

What people wanted was anything at all. Heidi, The Jungle Book, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Microbe Hunters, Automobiles from Start to Finish. Most donated books arrived worn out, so the carriers met once a week at the county headquarters to clip pictures and poems and recipes out of magazines and bind them into homemade scrapbooks, pressed flat under a borrowed auto jack. Card files were kept in cheese boxes and license plates served as bookends. Mountain women sent in their own quilt patterns and receipts to be bound in and sent around on the next route over. At the one room school at Monica, the teacher Carrie Lynch said the children just ate those books up. 

The riding stopped in 1943 when the WPA was wound up. Beattyville kept a small library at the county seat, but most of Lee County could not easily get there, and the hollows had no service again until the bookmobiles came along in the 1950s.

 

Info Via  Appalachia Remembered