That the spirit of the new public health movement is taking hold to some extent in Minnesota is the testimony of a local authority[27]:
“Koochiching County has the first and only county health organization in the state. The county commissioners and the county school board there see the economy of hiring a medical man to preserve the health of the community and to keep the children in school the maximum number of days each term.
“Furthermore, they have chosen a health officer with a proper point of view; one who believes that a health department should be an educational agency more than a police bureau; one who reserves the ‘police club’ for exceptional emergencies, but who is ever ready to instruct and convert. In Koochiching County the authorities are laying the foundation for a type of citizenship that is not only going to grow up healthy, but will be so well informed that it will observe sanitary laws and insist upon proper health safeguards. A county health organization similar to the one in Koochiching County, or a better one if it can be afforded, is needed in every Minnesota county, southern as well as northern, but particularly in the pioneer district.”
The public health movement in counties is by no means limited to the cited states.
COUNTY PLANNING
An example full of suggestive possibilities for almost any locality comes to us from Westchester County, N. Y. It is a district which is partly suburban and partly rural and has had very little unity excepting a political one. The lines of railroad travel run not to a common center within the county but to the Grand Central Terminal in New York City. This situation the Westchester County Chamber of Commerce set about to alleviate at least in some degree by means of a county physical plan which would facilitate communication between sections and possibly tend to distribute population more evenly. The plan calls for a carefully thought-out system of roads, parks and sewers. It is a private undertaking, but cities have official planning commissions; why not counties? What could better serve as the starting point for a broad, comprehensive program for a modernized county to undertake?
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.