Pack Horse Library Initiative

I think part of the unique American mindset, and more so during Christmas, is to find joy in heart warming stories of people helping others or doing something to better than communities. I was going to originally write about my Veterinarian, Amy Starr DVM, who always goes the extra mile in treating animals and who not only provides charity Vet and other services locally and in Mexico but in SE Asia and South America as well...but I ran across this story which I had never heard of and had to research more on. Thought I would share.

The Pack Horse Library Project was a Works Progress Administration (WPA) program that delivered books to remote regions in the Appalachian Mountains between 1935 and 1943, under then President Franklin Roosevelt’s initiatives to create jobs and decrease illiteracy to help lift America out of the Great Depression.

The Pack Horse Library Project was unique in that it was completely worked by women which at the height of the program used 30 supporting libraries to provide books and other reading material to 100,000 people. Pack horse librarians were paid by the WPA and these stalwart women traversed the difficult country side, often traveling as much as 120 miles a week to deliver reading material to these remote rural residents in rural Kentucky. They provided their own horses and mules, and reportedly were not deterred by bad weather.

By the end of 1938, there were as many as 270 librarians riding out across rural Kentucky counties. As many as 1,000 riding librarians participated in the program over the years with the program ending in 1943, the same year that the WPA was dissolved, as unemployment plummeted during wartime as US manufacturing picked up to produce war machines needed to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.