COUNTY LIBRARIES
Quite as fundamental to the welfare of the rural county as turnpikes and bridges is the awakening of its intellectual life. The school system is becoming everywhere more highly centralized, so that educational policies and administration are controlled from the state capitol. But the schools only meet the demand in an elementary limited way, leaving the adult population and the graduate of the common and high schools for the most part unprovided for. The United States Commissioner of Education has discovered that “probably seventy per cent. of the entire population of the country have no access to any adequate collection of books or to a public reading room. In only about one third of the counties of the United States is there a library of five thousand volumes or more. In only one hundred of these do the villages and country people have free use of the libraries.”
In 1901 an Ohio county through a legacy left by one of its citizens was enabled to meet this deficiency at least partially by establishing the first county library. It has grown rapidly and now has not only a central building but a number of sub-stations. The county is said, as a result of this beginning, to have experienced a general awakening which has been evidenced in good county pikes, county parks and a hundred other tangible ways.
Following the example of Ohio, county library laws were passed in Wyoming, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Missouri, Maryland, Oregon, Nebraska and New York. California has twenty-seven county libraries.