Review of: Frederic Public Library
From: Select Guide to Libraries of
the St. Croix Valley
By: Tim Krenz
Date: February 4, 2015
Now found in a renovated main street
movie theater in Frederic, Wisconsin, the Frederic Public Library
began in the village council rooms on February 18, 1936. Similar to
several other libraries in the St. Croix Valley, the local Woman's
Club did the heavy work starting the public library with 260 books,
and the Woman's Club did dedicated service to keep it functioning
through the Great Depression. Raising $153.42 in 1936 for the
library work, the library ended that year with a positive balance of
$22.67. (Information from a library document; author unknown).
From such humble and modest beginnings,
in a time of great national distress, founded on an intention to
serve the greater good of a community, Frederic's library grew with
the ages to become what any institution ultimately wants to become,
that of an asset important to healthy socieies. If a library
succeeds, as Frederic's has, it becomes a clothing, reflecting local
tastes and values, that a community wears with security and
confidence into the chillier uncertainty of the future.
The Frederic Public Library moved
several times over nearly 8 decades. In 2004, it moved into the new
quarters, the depression era movie house, that previous to the
library's residence, functioned as a warehouse. As part of the
remodeling for the library, a strikingly nice, curved theater marquee
hangs over the main street sidewalk, painted a cream brown with
mauve, almost purple trim. Above the $60,000 purchase of the
building, and $28,000 to raze a garage for a handicap-accessible
parking lot, the remodeling and rehabilitation of the building cost a
modest $380,000.
Like that magnificent marquee outside,
the library interior has a modern and excellently practical and warm
design, retaining its authentic feel as an old-town cinema stage.
The entrance lounge exudes a feel as though one would purchase a
nickel ticket, popcorn, soft drink, and candy for a Saturday matinee,
as reviving a lost Midwest small-town custom. In the main room past
an area of public space furniture, front desk and office spaces, one
finds thousands of items, normal for the size of this library, in
stomach high book shelves, like seating rows in middle and side
aisles, beneath the high vaulted ceiling of a open-theater space.
The direction leads one toward the imaginary “movie screen” along
the back wall, which now houses a multiple purpose work room and
children's section to the left. Where in past times audiences would
sit in the belief of make-believe film, the library offers old and
young a cinema-like imagination-of-mind in books, movie d.v.d.s,
magazines and story-sharing with real life people acting a role of
real living.
Chris Byerly, the library director, one
of four paid-staff (two of then part-time), pointed out one of the
main features of the modern library movement, the concept of the
“community living room.” The meeting place of a library builds
relationships between patrons who come to the library, each for their
own various reasons, yet eventually creating common cause. The
partnership between municipal government and a library goes far
beyond the necessary, and very proper, standards for libraries in
State of Wisconsin law. “People should have basic expectations in
any library they visit,” Byerly says.
Libraries take great efforts to build.
From the perspective of 79 years of history, and with 21st
Century challenges ahead, maintaining libraries and keeping them
relevant with present and future technology stands a most critical
question for all societies. Do libraries provide a luxury in local
services as the information age progresses, or will they remain as
fundamentally important to civilization as they have shown for the
past 2300 years, since the founding of hundreds of libraries by
Alexander the Great?
In addition to its proud collection of
a local history items, Frederic offers its citizens a library of
above-normal expectations, of both normal offerings and some
extraordinary ones. Chris Byerly, in an interview, touched on that
critical question of how libraries everywhere will maintain and build
relevance to their communities in the future. Kids always have a
great time in libraries, she mentioned, but as adults grow older,
they seem to find it harder to integrate themselves into things the
library offers. Those who care about libraries should not look at
that as a threat to the future of local libraries, but take it as a
challenge, and one which Frederic's historic building can instruct.
For adults to engage in their community, to reintegrate fractured
societies from nose deep into the technology of anti-social media, no
place offers a better opportunity than a library—to find
neighbors, and discover a richer sense of living, where all can play
life's performances, on the stage-theater of living history.
Libraries. . .libraries. . .libraries. . . we need them, and always
will.
