 We have a talk now, and I am delighted that you have come to join this presentation on Arlington's libraries through the centuries. So I'm going to speak just for a brief moment on how I've organized this talk. You know, I'll start first with the pre-public library years in Arlington, then the beginning of the free or public library era. The 19th century is exceptionally important because so much of that infrastructure carries forward here into the 21st century, many milestones of progress to share with you. And then I leave the chronological order in a couple of spots by branching out, specifically to talk about the branch libraries of Arlington. And in that way, I can keep the story of each of the two branches intact without running, if you will, up and down Massachusetts Avenue and breaking up the narrative. We'll then, obviously, resuming our chronological order, we'll look at the growth of what I call the modern library. So much of what happens in the modern library today derive from scientific approaches to libraries that really took hold in the 20th century in Arlington as in the nation and indeed the world. And naturally, I'll conclude on the 21st century, we're 20 years into it, and certainly we're witnessing history together and we're looking at a very exciting future. So with that, I will give you the quickest of Arlington's timelines so that you not be confused by some of the changing usage. In 1635, this area was settled by the English as monotomy, which is an indigenous name for the informal village of Newtown, what later became Cambridge. So we were fully part and parcel of Cambridge until 1732, when the northwest precinct, or the second parish of Cambridge, was created. And this entailed devolved municipal functions, certain oversight over the schools in the precinct, tax collection, assessments and activities such as that. It's not like the simple polling places that we view precincts of being today. There was definitely political and and other powers. However, there was not a library during the era of the Northwest precinct of Cambridge. In 1807, we were incorporated as an independent town by the name of West Cambridge. And in 1867, in order to acquire a distinct identity, we were renamed Arlington. So here's West Cambridge, Massachusetts, incorporated in 1807, population 900. And this is a woodcut view, looking west down Massachusetts Avenue. You can see the first parish church, what was then the first parish congregational Trinitarian Church. Today, its successor is the Unitarian Universalist Church. And you see the Whittemore-Robbins House in the center of the view in its original location, facing east, and we'll see more about that later on in the talk. In 1807, it's not only the year that West Cambridge was incorporated, but it is the year of West Cambridge or Arlington's very first library. It was called the West Cambridge Social Library. We have no extant documentation on that library. But it was a private group that got together for the purpose of acquiring and exchanging books among themselves. This was formalized nine years later in 1816 by the establishment of the West Cambridge Charitable and Reading Society. And this was a private subscription library similar to the Boston Athenaeum and other private libraries. People paid dues, I have a dues sheet here from 1831. And first I'll note, it's all men who belong to this library. And the dues were $1 per year, which was not an insubstantial amount of money. And not surprisingly, the list of names is very much the who's who of the leaders in Arlington. Timothy Wellington, the physician, William Whittemore, John Jarvis, names that we continue to know today in historical contexts. But the big news came in 1837 with the establishment of the West Cambridge Juvenile Library. This was Arlington's first free public library. And as the name indicates, it was devoted to children, what we call the children's room in earlier times the junior library. And it was intended to make available to the children of Arlington books that they could borrow. Something to point out is that books were very, very expensive. And people couldn't afford to have great collections of books in their homes. In many households, the Bible was the only book that was owned. But at the West Cambridge Juvenile Library, this was going to be a library of a variety of titles. But certainly titles that were edifying for the youth of the town. And while it was not a religious establishment, one of the accepted precepts is that this library would promote not only knowledge, but Christian virtues. So were the times in 1837. I'd like to tell you how this library came to be because it was not by the taxpayers of Arlington, even though it was a free institution. A gentleman by the name of Dr. Ebenezer Learned, this is a stereograph of his home in Hawkington, New Hampshire. And here is a better view of his home. When Ebenezer Learned was a student at Harvard, as was the custom in the time, Harvard students during their winter break term would come into Arlington to teach generally the older students of the town. There was no high school in that era, but certainly upper level grammar school students, and they would board with different families in the town for the period of time that winter session of the public schools of Arlington was happening. And Ebenezer Learned always, even though he went on to have a fine medical career and lived in New Hampshire, he always held the people of Arlington close to his heart for the tremendous hospitality that he received here and the tremendous memories he had of his time with the young people of Arlington. And so it was in his will that he made a bequest of $100 and that's all it took was $100 to endow a free library for the use of the young people of Arlington. Thus was established, the West Cambridge Juvenile Library. It's described in this image here as having been founded by Ebenezer Learned. In fact, it endowed would be the better term because he was the financial power behind it and then it was further endowed by Dr. Timothy Wellington, who you heard me mention just a few moments ago. It kept very limited hours, Saturday from 3 to 8 p.m. And it essentially functioned as a book depository, if you will. There was an appointed librarian and people came and requested a book or consulted with the librarian to get a book. And there were various rules and regulations here governing how long a book could be held for four weeks, the limit on the number of books a family could have, and interestingly, a fine of ten cents for every week that a book was kept out. So that was a lot of money back then. So here is a very quaint depiction from the year 1957. And we have some girls here reenacting Arlington's first children's library. And it's not only the first children's library of Arlington, it is in fact recognized as the first children's public library in the United States. And these ladies are sitting on the lawn facing Mass Avenue, that's the wall right in front of us in period costume with this lovely backdrop which features the location of the library, which was the home of the librarian. So the librarians of Robbins Library are probably very happy that the patrons don't come knocking on their front doors looking for books that we have a place for people to go, but the librarian and the librarian's home constituted the library. And I'll show you in a moment where it was located, but this is its most photogenic side, and it was a side facing home. And we're looking at it from the rear looking towards Massachusetts Avenue. It is legend has it that Jonathan Marsh Dexter took the funds for the library and made his way into Cambridge, where he purchased books that he put into a wheelbarrow and that he carted by walking from Cambridge into Arlington. I don't know if that story is apocryphal, but it's a beautiful story nonetheless of the hard work and hard physical work that it took to establish Arlington's first library. And here is the Jonathan Dexter house, Arlington's first library. And you can see here, this is a view from Massachusetts Avenue. And you can see the post for the railroad tracks, so that gives you an indication of where the railroad tracks would have been. And this photograph is from 1913, and the reason for taking this photograph is to show that the Dexter house survived. But you'll notice that some of its shutters are missing. And the reason for that is there was an explosion at the Arlington Gaslight Company. A demonstration water heater blew up and the house escaped destruction. As the years went by, it was hidden behind other commercial blocks. Here's a custom tailoring establishment as well as a little grocery store. And it ended its days with a laundry downstairs and with a coffee shop. But the Arlington Five Sense Savings Bank, which is located at the corner of Pleasant Street and Masters Avenue, wanted to create an automobile drive-through for banking. And as a consequence, it acquired the property and against the protests of many who loved history and historic preservation in the town, it was demolished in 1975. And here's a picture of the demolition in progress. And it gives you a good idea of where the Dexter house stood. And this picture to me is quite haunting because if you look to the far right, you can see scaffolding going up the tower and the steeple of the first parish Unitarian Universalist Church. And it would be just a matter of weeks following that the church would go up in flames. So as we saw one historic landmark in Arlington come down on purpose, we saw another tragically lost by accident. Today, the site of the Jonathan Dexter house is marked by this plaque, which is perhaps a little bit easy to overlook. But we're very happy that it's there. It reminds passerbys that Arlington was the home of the nation's first free children's library. And this gives you an image of the plaque and where it's situated next to the drive-through. So the library was a success. It came to be a library that was not just restricted to children's books, but became a general public library with adult offerings. And it needed more space, so it moved over to Arlington's New Town Hall when that building was completed in 1853. This building stood on the site of where the Uncle Sam statue is today. And here are the bylaws of the West Cambridge Town Library, as it was known. And one of the provisions was that it was always available for children or what they referred to as scholars to make use of. But adults could only use the library to the extent that the town would commit taxpayer dollars to help support and grow the library. And the amount that was required was just $30 all in from the town of Arlington. And that's what made Arlington's library full public libraries serving all ages, such as we might know today. By 1869, Arlington has been named Arlington two years earlier. And it continues to be a success. And you can see the number of books is numbering in the thousands and a circulation of 17,000 books per year. And it was always very, very carefully recorded how many books per year would not be returned because once a year, all books had to be returned so that inventory could be performed. So in its early decades, books, again, I cannot stress this enough, remained very expensive and very treasured items in the town. And interestingly enough, D.R. Cady on behalf of the trustees, this is the Reverend Cady of the Orthodox Congregational Church, what later became the Pleasant Street Congregational Church. It was always viewed as important to have a clergyman serving on the trustees of the libraries or on the school committee. And the reason for that was to ensure the moral well-being of the students. And it didn't necessarily have to be of the congregational denomination. It simply needed to be a clergyman in the day. In the 1867 annual report, we see that J.T. Trowbridge is signing and I'll speak a little bit more about him in a minute. But this is the last year that the library is going to be located in town hall because when it was located in town hall, it functioned just as it did when it was in Jonathan Marsh Dexter's home. It was a place where you went and borrowed and returned books. It did not have any kind of reading room or reference area. It was purely functioning, very importantly, but on a very limited basis, as a place for circulating books and books alone. And here is a portrait of John Townsend Trowbridge. Arlington was very privileged because John Townsend Trowbridge was one of the leading juvenile authors of the 19th and early 20th centuries. In his day, he was on a par in terms of his popularity with Mark Twain. And as a platform speaker and poet, he was renowned everywhere in the English-speaking world. And this is a selection of just some of his titles that are held in the local history room of Robbins Library. In 1877, the library moved out of its cramped quarters into Swan's Building, which was a commercial block. Arlington's population is now 4,000, so we have a book collection that outnumbers the population, which at a moment in history would have been something incredibly hard to imagine, but there it was. And this is a later view coming up. This image was made in 1910, but it offers us a much better view of Swan's Block. It is over at the right in the image along Massachusetts Avenue. And you can notice that it's a very large and imposing three-story mansard roof commercial block with ground floor stores. And on the top floor, when the building first opened, it was sort of an amusement arcade, and it included a shooting gallery so people could have practiced their marksmanship skills using various sorts of, obviously, non-lethal rifles. But that business went bust pretty quickly. And what do you do with an abandoned shooting gallery? You rent it to the town so the town can finally have some elbow room to create a public library. So the move into this space while humble compared to the spaces we would come to occupy was a big step forward in the way people came to use the library because it featured, as you can see here, this is the interior of the Arlington Public Library as it was then known, about the year 1880. We see the librarian on the far right there. On the far left, we see a young man reading a book and some young ladies there and a lady adjacent to the librarian who looks as if she's a library assistant, a map of Massachusetts on the wall. And the books that you see on the tables are the catalogs, which is why we refer to the collection in the library as being in a catalog. That's because once it was a physical bound book known as the catalog, which would then evolve into the card catalog and, of course, computerized systems for many decades now. Again, as humble as it looks, I really can't stress the change that this represented because people had a place to gather, to use reference works that couldn't circulate because of the high value of those publications. And also, it enabled the library to start to subscribe to different magazines, which could either be consulted in the reading room or borrowed as they are today. So it deeply broadened the mission of the library in terms of the type of reading materials and learning materials that it was going to offer to the general public. So a pretty good outcome for the old amusement establishment. And in this treasurer's report, we can see various charges and you can see the librarian's salary was $450 a year. And for some of you who are old enough, you can see the places where Arlington went to purchase its books. And one of the companies was called Estes and Loriats. And many of us will remember Loriats when it was a... Okay, are we back? Okay. Here we go. I've been told we're back. Otherwise, I'm just talking to myself here and that won't be the first time. In the year 1880, we see some excerpts from the librarian's report, talking about the number of books and magazines and how the collection was growing and the kind of circulation. It had all different statistics that we still rely on today to understand how we are serving the public. And you can see in the end the fines that were paid to the town treasurer. And the way that the library was supported in its early years was by three sources. One was the endowment that got the thing started. The second was the appropriation from the tax revenues of the town. And the third thing was the dog tax. Once dogs had to be licensed in the town, it was decided that we would take the dog licensing fees and we would use those as a significant means of support for the Arlington Public Library. This is the librarian, the first full-time librarian appointed by the town. Her name was Ms. Lizzie Newton. She served for 50 years. And she happened to be the sister-in-law of J.T. Trowbridge. And we don't want to say nepotism here. He was on the board of trustees, but Lizzie Newton was not able to be successful in her role and be a part of the library during its many phases of growth for a half century without a considerable talent and dedication of her own. So she is, I would say, an icon of Arlington Library history. For those of you viewing at home, I am from time to time seeing the image move. And if you're experiencing that, so am I. And I'm given to understand that the sound cut out a little bit earlier. So I hope you've been able to pick up, as I've been able to pick up here. So this is the reference list of the Arlington Public Library. And it talks about different publications and what I would call your attention to just as a matter of interest. In the left-hand column, you see many volumes relating to ancient Greek. And in order for graduates of a high school to be properly prepared for entering universities, knowledge of the ancient languages of Greek and Latin were essential. And the Codding High School, which eventually became Arlington High School, continued to offer ancient Greek right up until the year 1913. And so you can tell that reference works in ancient Greek, I don't think there's much demand for it today, but it was utterly indispensable for an educated work, educated school population that was going to go on for higher ed. So let's get into some more recognizable stuff. You probably recognize this house as the house, as someone put it to me, the big yellow house in the backyard of the library. That's a OK description. This is the Whittemore-Robbins House. It was built in 1800, as I showed you in the very first woodcut. Its original location on Mass Avenue is where Robin's Library stands today. And it faced east on Massachusetts Avenue. There were a number of battles back and forth because there was a desire to widen the avenue. But Nathan Robbins, who was the richest person in the town, who lived in the house, he objected strongly to that. But there was a constant pressure for the house to be relocated. And it turned out that after Nathan Robbins' death that the owners of the house would agree to do that. And these are Arlington's iconic Robin sisters, Kayira, Ida, and Eliza. And Kayira, at left, would go on to play a very strong role in Robbins' Library. It is sometimes misunderstood that the Robin sisters donated everything to the town. The Robin sisters were incredibly generous benefactors to the town, including the Whittemore-Robbins House, paying for the town hall gardens to be developed so their contributions cannot be underestimated. But there were other branches of the Robbins family that were very generous to the town, such as Winfield Robbins, the son of Amos Robbins, who left in his will the money that we build Arlington Town Hall. So I'll come back to the Robin sisters in just a moment. And their brother is often forgotten, but it was actually their brother, only Robbins, who actually was the owner of the Whittemore-Robbins House in the year 1890 when the decision was taken to make the land on which the house stood available for the building of a public library. And it was only who died tragically in 1905, who gave his permission for that to happen. And the house was moved back to its present location now. We'd be looking, obviously, at the little parking lot of the library. We have to park someplace, but we have this very nice view here of the house, the cottage in the back, the carriage house. And if you'll look to the top of the carriage house, the recently restored dove coat that was put there. But the library was the gift of Maria Farmer Robbins. And it was in memory of her husband, who had died in 1883, Eli Robbins. Eli Robbins, along with Amos Robbins and Nathan Robbins, made their fortunes in the poultry business. And they really were innovators in that space. And Eli Robbins and Maria Farmer Robbins moved from Arlington and settled in what was then the independent city, later borough, of Brooklyn, New York, and made a tremendous success there and acquired quite a fortune. Now we look at Maria Farmer Robbins. These are the portraits that hang in the elevator lobby of Robbins Library today. So they're perhaps familiar to you, not least, if you're staying there waiting for the elevator. And we see Maria Farmer Robbins. This is our only regular image of her. But she was once a joyful young woman. She was born in this house here. This house still stands. It's owned today by the Housing Corporation of Arlington on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Forestry. It stands at sort of an angle. And this is a beautiful photograph of that taken in 1919. This was the home of Kimball Farmer. And it's the home where she was born and raised until her marriage to Eli Robbins. And here is a family photograph of Maria Robbins. We see her at left with Eli flanking their two sons, Warren and Clinton. Warren died in his 20s and Clinton when he was just 10 years old. So consequently, Eli and Maria Robbins found themselves childless with no direct heirs. And after Eli died, Maria wanted to do something with their fortune. And she was very generous to their church in Brooklyn and to a number of other institutions. But she was especially generous to Arlington in terms of providing the money so that Arlington could build Robbins Library. And this is a picture of Robbins under construction. It was not going to be just any library. It was not going to be a red brick building like the commercial block that it currently occupied. Rather, Cabot, Everett, and Mead prominent architects in Boston were going to be engaged to create a truly monumental library in Arlington. Now it's often said in the retelling of different stories of the design of Robbins Library that it is a copy or it's patterned after a very famous building in Rome, which is called the Palazzo della Canterria. But in fact, it's not correct. I'm going to show you a picture of that building now. And you can see, no, it doesn't look like Robbins Library. It doesn't have the massing. It doesn't have the roofline. The entrance is not the same. But the reason this connection came to be was different of the architectural treatments of windows and other features of this Italian Renaissance building ended up being applied to the design of this Renaissance revival building. So that is the connection between the two. Another thing that you can discover in print is that people talk about Robbins Library being built of Indiana limestone. It is not. It is built of Buff, Ohio, Bedford, Ohio, Sandstone. It is the town hall that is built of Indiana limestone. So for such a prominent architectural feature of the town, there tends to be a lot of confusion that has crept into the history. And yes, there will be a quiz at the end of this talk. So another portrait of Maria Farmer Robbins, who unfortunately did not live to see Robbins Library opening and functioning. She did, however, live to see it in progress. The library was opened at the end of 1892, and she died in 1891. She was living with her nieces by marriage, the Robbins sisters, and her nephew by marriage, only Robbins, in the Wittemore Robbins house. So after having donated $100,000, because that's what it took to build this library, and it was an unbelievable sum then, you can imagine Maria Robbins perhaps sitting on the porch of Robbins Library, or as she grew ill, looking out the window of a bedroom, and seeing this magnificent building built in memory of her beloved late husband rising up before her. And when her funeral took place, and she's buried at Mount Pleasant Cemetery here in Arlington, the funeral was held in her home at the time, the Wittemore Robbins house. And very poignantly, her casket was brought by in procession in front of the yet to be opened library. In the summer of 1892, the library is nearing completion. Arlington's population is 6,500 at this point. And when this library came to be in the town, it was as if a palace had been dropped into the midst of Arlington. There was nothing so magnificent that the town had ever seen before. And to give you a point of comparison, what had been the most magnificent from an architectural point of view, building in Arlington center prior to that, was the Arlington five cents savings bank building, which we perhaps might unkindly refer to as a Victorian pile, it was built in 1874, and it was taken down in 1995. This is a picture from about 1907. And so this is what passed for a big deal. With the Odd Fellows Hall on the top floor and then the bank. And so imagine that this was the big deal and along came Robbins Library. This is a program from its dedication on November the 29th, 1892. And it was just about three years ago that we had a 125th birthday celebration on November the 29th for Robbins Library. And many of Arlington's milestones are measured from this point forward. This is when it ceased to be the Arlington Public Library and it became Robbins Library. And recently in our neighboring city of Medford, the Medford Public Library has acquired a name due to a generous benefactor, former Mayor Bloomberg of New York. And it is named in honor of his deceased parents because Bloomberg was a native of Medford and made great use of its library. And so we have a little bit of a parallel that's happening right now as Medford is building. It's from the ground up, a new library. Speaking of ground, this is the ground floor rotunda. I think it will look familiar to all of us here, perhaps minus the seat in the middle. The library was a meeting point back in the days when you might have to wait a little while for someone. You couldn't text them to give them a block by block point of your progress to meet them so people could settle in here and perhaps ducky and out from the rain. But we're very fortunate that the architectural splendor is very much with us. Those windows that you see in the background that are moving along an arch, those were exterior windows and those openings were preserved and those are the three doorways that lead into the current adult reference area. And that's the elevator lobby you see in the middle ground there. And here we have the statue of Firefly. Now you notice that Firefly was the very first thing you saw when you came in and there she was in her blissful nudity and it sometimes shocks people to imagine that in 1892 we would have such a naked lady if you will as the first thing you saw when you entered the library but there was a tremendous appreciation for the fine arts and here we see Firefly. Firefly has been consigned to the spiral staircase where she occupies a niche and if you look very closely at her anatomy you can tell that some people are perhaps rubbing against her for good luck, we'll leave it at that. And the other statue that once was in the lobby is now adorning the reading room of the library and you'll notice the light fixtures there. These are replacement light fixtures from when the library was renovated in the mid 1990s and they were meant to replicate the combination of gas and electric fixtures that would have existed at Robin's library. You would have had the electric part on the bottom and you would have had the gas lighting on the top and the reason you had combination fixtures was that electricity wasn't that reliable and at the first passing cloud you could lose electricity and you needed a backup source of lighting and gas lighting absolutely provided that. The circulation desk does not look very inviting. We see the portraits of Maria. Maria unfortunately is obscured behind a gas light fixture, a combination light fixture of the period and we see Eli overlooking the circulation desk. At first the stacks were not open. It was a closed stacks. There was not much browsing per se of the collection but rather you would present a book slip and your book would be obtained for you in the stacks that you can see behind the circulation desk and again it has the look of an old fashioned bank so that people couldn't reach across and help themselves to the valuable treasures that were the books of 1892 and certainly nothing as wonderful as we have today as the very inviting circulation desk that has a lowered area that both makes for a more enjoyable experience for wheelchair users and also for young people. This is the Rotunda at the upper level in its original iteration as an art gallery. I had mentioned earlier that the fine arts were important and what was donated to Robbins Library was a remarkable collection of prints and engravings and the objective of these was that the library would serve not only as a place of literature and magazine and literary forms of education but also to educate and enlighten the people of Arlington through displays of fine arts and this was carried on well into the 20th century with changing exhibits, not the print collection which was very much a product of its time and did not see a lot of use too deep into the 20th century but more contemporary exhibits about current events and world travel and children's book illustrations and things like that. So there would be every two months a different show that people would come to see at Robbins Library and that was a very important part of the programming in the library and it took place here up in the top floor art department. And this gives you yet another view and you can see the seating so that people might have a rest as they would in a museum and enjoy the artwork at their leisure. I spoke of lighting earlier for those of you who are familiar with the prestige jewelry firm of Shreve Crump and Low, no expense was spared in the external or internal fittings of the library and these chandeliers which sadly are lost. At a moment in time they were replaced by hanging fluorescent lights. The lighting came from Shreve Crump and Low and the fireplace was very frequently used. Some people wonder why does the library not face Massachusetts Avenue? Well, as you can see, it was constrained by its lot because immediately to the left in this image you see a mansard roof house which was built about 20 years before Robbins Library was built and this was the mansion house of Alvin Robbins and that would not be moved away until 1907 to make room for the town hall and the town hall gardens. So consequently, when the architects designed the building it faced the same way the Wittemore Robbins house used to face, but it was for very much of a practical reason rather than any kind of sentimental reason relating to the Wittemore Robbins house. This is a nice aerial view taken from the steeple of what was then the first Paris Unitarian Church and you can see Robbins Library and you can see the Alvin Robbins mansion just beyond that and the steeples of what is now High Rock Church and the Baptist Church in the background. In 1898, the library formed a partnership with the Arlington Historical Society and the first designated area for artifacts what were known as the relics or the relic room of the Arlington Historical Society was located in Robbins Library and in our neighboring town of Belmont that type of relationship continues to exist. The Belmont Historical Society has the Claflin Room in the Belmont Public Library and when the Jason Russell house was acquired in 1923 by the society, its collections were moved and the space surrendered back to the library but there continued to be very strong bonds between the two historical oriented organizations in town and in particular through Arlington's local history room. So greetings from Arlington. This is a postcard from 1915 and you can see in the background that Alvin's house is gone and the town hall is there and the Cyrus Dallin flagpole is there. I might mention that Cyrus Dallin for many years was a trustee of Robbins Library. The town is exploding and the library is going to struggle to keep pace. In 1915, the population was conveniently around 15,000. It makes it easy to remember. And in 1925, it was roughly 25,000 and it would continue to grow and grow. 10 years later, it would be about 35,000 and it would be the current population it is today it would be about 44,000 by 1944. As you can see in the Boston evening record, they felt that it was big news to report that almost 60,000 books had been issued by the Arlington Library during 1918. I'm gonna talk about 1918 big year in the world, big year in Arlington, big year for the library. I wanna give you a glimpse of the junior library at this time. So junior library went from being the thing. In fact, for many years, we only had a junior library and being constrained for space as we were, it was in these kind of quarters, it looks very austere. And yes, all those books you see on the shelves were wrapped in brown paper covers because that was considered a way that you would protect the books because you wanted them to have a very, very long life in circulation, but it certainly does not resemble even a wit the delightful children's room that we have in our library today. Big room, I should say. During 1918, one of the functions of Robbins Library, as was true of public libraries throughout the United States, was to be a collection point for books that were gonna be shipped either to stateside military camps or to be shipped along with troop ships in order to supply soldiers in the field who were fighting in France and Belgium during World War I. And Robbins Library was extremely active in this activity. And many, many boxes of books were donated by the people of Arlington and prepared at Robbins Library and sent along to Boston for shipment. Also in 1918 came the influenza. And obviously, if people weren't acquainted with what the great influenza could be like, I think we're very well acquainted with it today. And in 1918, what was also known as the Spanish flu, because it was erroneously believed to have started in Spain and this is, and it was not done pejoratively in the way that we sometimes hear the term, Chinese flu used, unfortunately, in the year 2020. But here's a public notice. Well, Robbins Library had to close its doors during the great influenza, as did movie theaters, not all restaurants. The closures were not as extensive as they were today, even though the great pandemic of 1918 took many, many lives, sickened many, many people. And unlike the coronavirus pandemic that mostly puts at risk the lives of older people, the thing about the Spanish influenza was that it was particularly lethal to younger people who would have been expected to easily survive the flu. So many people were cut down in their prime. And one of the places, in addition to closing schools, Robbins Library was closed. So the staff worked inside and they opened all the windows for ventilation, but this was the October, November time period. And in the diary of Nina Nguyen, who was an employee of Robbins Library at the time, she described how freezing cold it was inside Robbins Library, because even though the staff was working inside during an array of library responsibilities, the town certainly wasn't during the war going to waste coal to heat the building, to heat the staff warm. So at lunchtime they would gather around the fireplace and warm up as best they could. The library, by the 1930s, the population is about 30,000 and the library needed enlargement. There was a little problem though. There was the Great Depression, the stock market crash of 1921, meant that the great plans in 1930 to put an addition on Robbins Library had to be curtailed. But what we see in this image is the original 1892 library and then a connecting section which would be referred to in architectural terms as a hyphen and looking at this image, that the reason for that becomes clear. And it would connect to a dedicated building for a junior library. And the design was by the architectural firm of Gay and Proctor. William Proctor was born and raised in Arlington and a prominent Arlington resident. And it was he who designed this design but unfortunately due to a budget limitations during the Great Depression, it had to be paired back. So this is what ended up being built. We don't have the hyphen, but we see that to the extent possible, preserving as much of the original building as possible and having the new extension be shall we say, reticent sitting back from the main block of the library was rather successfully achieved. It was carried out in a general renaissance revival style and it was for the junior library. There were children galore in Arlington, very large families growing evermore and they had their own dedicated entrance to their library. And this is how it looked inside. Some of you will recognize the beautiful fireplace of what is now the fiction room. But what I very well remember as the junior library and can remember taking my niece was a grown woman now to do a Saturday morning crafts in this very space before the modern edition was put on the library today. And children's focus throughout the history has remained strong in Arlington. Here's a view of some children's programming taking place in the reflecting pool. They would have a boat race going on and these would be the young people participating in the summer activities sponsored by Robin's library. And they had something that was known as the Everland Cruiser. And so Everland was a weekly newspaper put on by the young people participating in the library summer programs. And this example is very nicely preserved in the local history room. I do see here that I'm being hooked up everyone. I don't know what that's about, but here in the ACMI studios, I'm gonna trust that it's for a good reason and I'm just gonna keep on talking. All right, this is perhaps my favorite image of all of the ones I'm sharing with you. It's a hand tinted photograph of participants in the 1930s summer reading program, all costumed I would imagine for putting on a play or a similar activity. That is not the normal wearing apparel of young people in the 1930s. Now I'm gonna step back a bit and talk about the branches. So I'm making a leap back in time and the very first branch library in Arlington was in Arlington Heights. It became a more and more of a population center starting in 1872 when the Arlington Heights subdivision to the south of Mass Ave was laid out. And in that same year on the north side of Massachusetts Avenue, Moncoboa Crescent Hill was laid out. And although those neighborhoods did not grow as fast as the developers would have hoped, nonetheless it became an identifiable population center with a village center with shops, with a post office, with the kinds of features that you would expect of that. And the streetcar did not extend into Arlington Heights the only public transportation service was the steam railroad. So people would either have to walk from the Heights to the main library, which again remember prior to Robin's library being built was in the center of Arlington. So the trustees got together and said, okay, how can we serve the people in the Heights and not only the people of the Heights but perhaps the people in the comparatively sparsely populated East End as East Arlington was then known. So it was decided that the way to get going would be to send a basket of books up to the railroad station and the station master would be in charge of distributing the books. So again, it functioned more like a book depository and circulation point, but it was very popular and successful. They did not end up putting one in East Arlington. And one of the reasons for that is the old Arlington Heights railroad station, which is right next to the bike path. So you can visualize pretty easily where it would be right in Arlington Heights. But just as you can visualize where the bike path is a way down Lake Street, that already was remote in an area that was pretty remote and sparsely populated. So a decision was taken to not serve the East End of Arlington with a branch library. So here was this, the popularity was such that it moved and here is some shameless advertising for one of my books, but not really. Although this book I did write and the royalties for this book since it was published in 2006, go to support the local history room of Robbins Library. And the reason I included is to show a building that's familiar to many of you and that is the Arlington Coal and Lumber building. At the time it was known as Union Hall. On the first floor was a grocery store and on the upper hall was a meeting room. So the library had some facilities there for a number of years and then moved into the basement of the Locke School. And this is a postcard of the Locke School. It was built in 1900 and it really did not have much room to spare because in 1901 it had to be doubled in size. So if it looks small to you today, it is and this postcard is an anachronism. This is a postcard from 1907, but it is based on a photograph obviously before 1901. But the Heights branch of the library was located in the basement here, which meant again, circulation of books and a very small collection of books. But mostly it was a place where they would call down to the library and decide what books were needed and those books would come up and people would collect and return them there. Certainly no notion of community center back then, but nonetheless an extremely valuable service in the era before radio. Books were very much it in people devoured literature, even people who didn't devour it, consumed much more of it. As the editor of the advocate said, it's time that Arlington starts shifting for ourselves. There was increasing demand for decades that there be a proper branch library built in Arlington Heights. Only there was no motion underway to make that happen. It could never be funded. The appropriation wouldn't happen and the reason the editor of the advocate said we needed to shift for ourselves was that Arlington had enjoyed the munificence of the Robbins family, for the town hall, for the garden, for Robbins library, for the Whittemore Robbins house. And Mr. Parker said, when are we gonna start to pay for some of our own things as opposed to waiting for people to make gifts of them to us? So indeed the town loosened its perch strings and you can see when it was dedicated, it was simply described as ranch of the Robbins library at Arlington Heights. The architect was William Proctor, who I mentioned earlier to you, who had been the designer of the edition on Robbins library and a lovely colonial revival example. I'm sitting in that former branch library right now, broadcasting to you and you can see that it was dedicated at the start of 1938 and very soon after, here's a photograph of it, a period photograph taken in the wintertime. Now the studios of ACMI. Very soon after it was dedicated in honor, not in memory of, she was very much alive, in honor of Victoria Dallin, who besides being the wife of Cyrus Dallin, had renowned in of her own tremendous accomplishment in areas of drama, in civic life, in the promotion of literary life. And she was an ardent supporter of providing deeper library services in the Heights. And the result was a truly lovely branch library. This is the interior. It really was the last word in branch libraries and it showed what Arlington could do if it put its money in more to the point it's energy into. And it was a success from the start. Now there was a change in the library hours. This is a little piece of ephemera from 1942. It says due to oil rationing, because it's World War II, the trustees of the library have had to curtail the library hours of the Dallin branch during the winter months. So it was open for very few hours. And again, this was a wartime measure, but yet it did remain open. You just had to do some planning in order to successfully make use of the Dallin branch. And you can see at the bottom, see that your children enjoy the story hour. Saturdays at one o'clock, ask the branch librarian for tickets. Remember, loads and loads of kids. No ticket, you are not gonna be able to attend. And here's an invitation to the library. The library sent out a bit of a Christmas card and it just talks about the long history of service of the library and the wide array of services that were being offered in the day. And among these services, starting in 1942, was a staff member, in this case, Mrs. Ruth Foster, who was the Sims Hospital Librarian. And once a week, she came through and visited the patients at Sims Hospital, who were either recuperating from illness or convalescing. People tended to have long hospital stays and literature was viewed as not only a way to pass the time, but to promote their restoration to good health. And it wasn't just gonna be a book card that was pushed from room to room, but rather having a professional librarian discuss the tastes of the reader and the interests of the reader would make for a more successful experience in terms of the books that the patients would borrow. And you can see here that the librarian was even in an appropriate uniform and she has Robin's library on her hospital uniform. But otherwise, the librarians inside the library were dressed in street clothes. But I love this image and love the concept. As you can see, some street clothes going on here. We have a Bobby Soxer. We have a librarian giving her a book. She doesn't look too pleased with what's been requested, but that's how it might have been. This is from 1953. This is a photograph that appeared in the Boston Herald. And the purpose of the photograph was to extol the new improvements that were made to Robin's library. It was still operating within its same physical plant, but it had installed open stacks, multi-story stacks and had really squeezed into its limited available space as many books and services as it possibly could. But it was getting tight. During the 1950s, school libraries, this is another photograph, were becoming an important part of the picture that had not been true in other places such as Somerville or Waltham in the early part of the 20th century. There were not school libraries per se, but there were school deposits in the classrooms and books circulated from there and they circulated from playgrounds during summer camp, public park programs and things like that. And Arlington was a little slow to get on that bandwagon, but here we see in 1953 a scene in the Bishop School Library. Finally, the East is gonna get a branch and it's not gonna have to begin at the railroad station. It's not gonna have to go into a hall above a grocery store, but it's gonna be in two tiny rooms in the basement of the Crosby School, a building which is still standing on Winter Street. It's a private school today, next to the janitor's closet. So it was not exactly a welcoming space, but most of Arlington's population growth in the 1910s and 1920s was happening in the East. And it was a diverse population such as Arlington had not seen before. Diversity in the 19th century would have been Irish immigrants. Here were people coming in for a first generation or immigrants themselves coming from a variety of countries, be it Italy, Poland, Sweden, I could name Turkey, meaning Armenians from the Ottoman Empire had settled in great numbers in East Arlington, many children in East Arlington. So in 1917, this very modest branch library was that from reference to everyone, Maldon Library has closed. I saw it, I thought that was a message for me I'm getting on my screen. So in any event, just imagine the basement being the branch library and from time to time, they try to put a little display on or something to attract people in. But I would say in addition to regular library services, it kept very good evening hours for working people. And more especially from the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners, it got as part of its collection besides the books that would be called down from the main library. It undertook to have a special collection of books in non-English languages. So it was playing a very important role to serve the reading needs of this population. And again, all the libraries in Arlington were very involved with literacy and with what was called Americanization to help people to acquire better English language skills. In 1952, the population was higher than it is today. It was 46,000 people. And finally, the library is getting out of the basement. There's a bid that is awarded for the East Branch Library and it was gonna be built at a cost of $35,000. And here it is. And everyone was so excited and in the language of the day, they said our ugly duckling branch library has become a beautiful swan. I'm not sure I would use beautiful swan to describe this architecture. Penitentiary kind of comes to my mind, but nonetheless, it was beloved and it is located right where the Fox Branch Library stands today. And it was known as Robin's Library East Arlington Branch and it was used from the get-go. This is the inside of the library. You can tell it was a little bit dark in the library. The windows weren't great all the way around, but nonetheless, it was beloved and used and here's a wonderful period picture of young people taken inside the East Branch Library. And in 1969, it was modernized and you can see much improvement in the lighting and dedicated in memory of Edith Fox. Edith Fox lived at 29 Gray Street and she was the unmarried daughter of a gentleman who had made his fortune in commercial, large-scale commercial bakery. Some people say it's tabletop pies. That's not quite it, but it was pies along the lines of tabletop pies. And at her death, she left large sums of money to the Boy Scouts, to the Pleasantry Corrugational Church, to what was then the Boys Club, now the Boys and Girls Club, and money so that the East Branch Library could be significantly improved. And you noticed that in 1831, I showed the list of the members of the Charitable Reading Society, the private library that was before the era of Arlington having public libraries and you saw that they were all men. And if you've been paying attention, you'll notice that we had Maria Robbins as the force behind Robbins Library being built. We had Victoria Dallin and here we have Edith Fox. So when women came to take their places, boy, did they take them. Why didn't I say boy, did they take them? Yeah, they took them, not boy. Unfortunately, the Fox Branch, like the Dallin Branch became a casualty of proposition two and a half. That was a law that the voters voted on in 1980 and it took effect in 1981. And it severely constrained municipal budgets by limiting how much they could just spontaneously increase without an override per year to just two and a half percent. Now remember, the 70s and the 80s are periods of high inflation, increasingly high energy costs. This was catastrophic to municipal services and it was felt very deeply in all of the libraries, especially in the branch libraries. They held on. They cut their hours, did the Dallin Branch Library move from occupying two floors to just one floor. They did any number of things to try to continue to keep the branches going, but it was what I would have to term a slow death. And in 1989, both branches closed. The Heights Branch remained closed and as I mentioned, it's been repurposed as the ACMI studio. But in East Arlington, it went on to be really saved very much by the community, a real grassroots effort with many leaders who got together to raise funds in a number of creative ways. I'm sure a few of you are listening in on this presentation and there was an override at one point to provide additional means for the library and community center as it's referred to now to reopen. So these things all combined, the little Fox shop. At one point in its history, the library had a support group that was called the Foxy Friends. So, and you know I can't make that up. And during the epidemic, although the library is closed, I really love this image of some images that were created by the children who very much love Fox Library and what it means to them and posting their artwork in the windows. So even though they kind of come inside, it's as if they're looking out to us and waiting to be welcomed back. So that's kind of it on the branches of the library. We'll come back to the main library and talk about some of the changes that were happening. And we'll jump right back to the mid-century. And it looks as if Fonzie from Happy Days is there with a few of his friends. These are young people enjoying LPs and taking part in music and art. There was a young adult section to which a great amount of dedicated attention was being paid at the library. So this was very much a baby boomer type of approach to library services. And here we see the director for many years, Judith Strondahl, who is the second person from the left, who is accepting the gift of a motion picture projector. Again, a big deal for Robbins Library because Movie Night would be a popular event. Certainly there were two movie houses in Arlington, the Capitol and the region. So people didn't have a shortage of cinemas to go to, but this was a way to bring the community in. They might see educational films, films of entertainment and above all, films that were free of charge. Bookmarks of the Arlington Libraries. Banks were big supporters of the library and they were local banks. Here we see the Harvard Trust Company, what eventually became a Bank of America branch, the Arlington Five Sense Savings Bank. Today's Cambridge Savings Bank and the Arlington Cooperative Bank, which is today a citizen's bank in Arlington. But the banks didn't just print the bookmarks, they were very much involved as business supporters of the library. And the Friends of the Robbins Library, did you know it is the Friends 60th anniversary? I'm a member of the Friends, it's our 60th anniversary. So I'll have to look up what kind of anniversary that is. And we see some members here in 1972 of the Friends of Robbins Library at the book sale, which didn't quite happen as planned this year, but there was a COVID appropriate version of it that took place. And we can see the kind of contraptions that the kids came to the library in during those years. And the very first book sale was in 1972. And I'd like you to look at that baby in the carrier and realize that he quite possibly had his 50th birthday this year. The library welcomed volunteers. Volunteers play a great role in Robbins Library and have for many years. And here we see true volunteers hard at work at Robbins Library. It's a constituency that no telling of the library story in Arlington could do without. Here we see how the reading room looks. It's been converted, the chandeliers are gone. If you look straight ahead, you can see all the stacks rising up on mezzanines above what is today the circulation desk. It's a crowded area. Everything's happening in one place. There's barely room to breathe, but things are carrying on. You work with what you have. Technical services was down on the community room. We're ordinarily, I would be giving you this presentation. You can recognize it by the fireplace. They have much nicer quarters now. And here we see, we're getting toward the end here, we've got a little late start. In 1974, the population of Arlington was 52,000. So we did at one point experience a population decline of almost 20%. And something that would strike us as peculiar today, but what was utterly normal and expected was a reading list, books for Lent, and for Easter of 1974. Town Day, Town Day is our modern day, the answer place. The young lady on the right is none other than Mary Ellen Remert, known to many of you as Mary Ellen Remert Loud, long-term former librarian here at Robbins and a member of the staff earlier in her career. And another successful launch. They were launching a balloon. I don't know what was in there. So the library, where did you use your first computer? Depending on how old you are listening to this talk, if you are age 40 or younger, chances are you used your first computer in your own home. But if you're 40 or older, unless you were working in the scientific field or you had some professional or academic reason to be using a computer, chances are people's first encounter with a computer was the catalog, the card catalog computerized in your local library. And those were in the days before a mouse. This is a picture that was taken in the 90s. And now the question becomes, where will you view your last microfilm? The Arrington Advocate was microfilmed in 1952. It's coming up on its 70th birthday. And it is the hope of myself and many others that a project of Robbins Library will be to digitize the Arrington Advocate so that we can look at historical copies from the comfort of our homes and also, and more importantly, have the ability to crawl through the text and find hidden aspects of Arrington's history that'll jump forth once it's in that format to capture the things that aren't indexed. But for now, microfilm, where will we view it? Well, it'll probably be still at the library. Celebration and anticipation, Robbins Library had its centennial, but it also was building on tradition with the tremendous expansion of the library and done in a very sympathetic style. I am forever grateful that people had come to realize that a sympathetic addition from an architectural perspective was so important to respect the architectural tradition. In so many cases, you can visit a place that had an absolutely magnificent original building and it was the flavor of the year architectural addition that was slapped onto it, completely incoherent. We cannot say that about our library addition. It really adds so much to the library. So in the 1960s, we had stack stacks. And in the 1940s, we had more of an interior and exterior reunification of the architecture. We see here in what is now the elevator lobby, we see a couple of ladies enjoying a read. They're reading books on psychology and astrology and topics such as that that were very 70s and ready for the 21st century. By the year 2000, our population was about 42,500 and it's remained around that point, give or take. And here is how the library looks today. And it has just expanded the possibilities. No longer are we crowded in for an art exhibit next to boxes of supplies and cabinets and things like that as we formerly were. And what had been thoroughly enclosed and hidden from view was our magnificent rotunda, which was reopened and we've enjoyed it. The library addition was built in 1994, so it's already more than 25 years old. It seems like it went up so much more recently, but it's been a while and now it's time. It's 25 years have gone by and it's time to think about what does the library need to look like for the next 25, 50 years and beyond. This is a wonderful Venn diagram that shows the different groups that are working together to strengthen our libraries. And I just wanna give them a mention here. At the center, we have Robbins Library and the Fox Branch Library. And we see the group that has existed for all time, which is the library board of trustees that formerly was an elected office in town and under the town manager act, it came to be an appointed office and the director of the library under the town manager, former government reports to the town manager, but nonetheless the trustees as a consultative body, as a body that oversees the administration of trust funds that are very important to the life of the library. The trustees fill a very important role at the library. Down below, moving counterclockwise, we see friends of the Robbins Library of which I've just spoken, and friends of the Fox Library, who are very, very active, very much of lifeblood for Fox Library. And the newcomer to the group is the Arlington Libraries Foundation. I say newcomer, but this year it's seven years old. And the Arlington Libraries Foundation was created in part because the government determined that trustees of libraries could not play active fundraising roles. Before it would be the trustees who would organize campaigns to be open on Sunday to get through private fundraising, such as the It Makes Sense campaign. And that activity is no longer allowed and Arlington, like many other communities, established a libraries foundation in order to advance the private philanthropy objectives that help to support Robbins Library and the Fox Branch Library. And it is through the funds raised through the annual appeal, through memorial gifts, through endowed gifts that continue the tradition of philanthropy on which Robbins Library was built to begin with. And here we are today. And I do mean today. The doors of Robbins Library are closed. One day in March, we were doing Arlington reads together and the next week, we weren't doing anything together. COVID came in. The library did anything but go dark. The physical building may have closed to the outside, but the abundance of programming, especially the programming that you can access through the Facebook platform, children's programming, adult programming, music, you name it, just browse the Robbins Library Facebook page and you will be surprised at not just the resourcefulness in reaction, but rather the creativity, how to make the libraries remain relevant throughout all of this. It's meant amping up a lot of our online resources and making more of those available for in-home use, the reintroduction of hoopla. So the library, again, I could go on for a long time and someday another historian will about how the libraries came together. And Fox is very much an active part of this as well, albeit again online. And this was one of the events I especially love, which was the children's book giveaway that took place in the town hall gardens because people needed to be outside and appropriately distancing. And if you think back to the 1930s and the children having their boat races in the reflecting pool, and you can see the joy that children got in the year 2020 in a year that has been lacking quite a lot of joy. And I especially love this photograph here because when you can't see your friends, you can always remember that a book is your friend. And Arlington's COVID-19 Community Archive, I would invite everyone, if you've not done so already, to visit the website, robinslibrary.org, look for the local history resources, and you will see a section here on how to contribute the photographs you may have taken of things that are unique to the COVID situation as it happened in Arlington. And there's a very complete description there. So it's being built. It's a great way of collecting history. And my favorite video, if you visit the robinslibrary Facebook page, go to August 7th. And here we have Marie Cannon, the head of circulation, who takes viewers on a short, but wonderful tour so you can figure out how we're getting our hands on books. Because what's happening in the year 2020? Well, in a certain respect, we have gone back to our origins as a place where you can't go into the library, you can't read in the reading room, you can't browse, physically browse the stacks. So we have become a circulation point. And obviously with the tremendous enhancements that the internet has offered to us. So the situation isn't entirely comparable, but when it comes down to the core mission of circulating physical books, we're right back where we were in 1807. But doing it better, I think, and doing it again creatively. Here we have the grab bags. And these grab bags of books have been put together to the joy of people who have ordered them, giving them new discoveries. And giving them a chance to look over the selection in a nice safe COVID appropriate way. And there was a big drive and the people responded generously with their paper bags. And they responded so generously that in the vestibule to the main library, thank you. We've had a great response to our call for brown paper bags. We have all we can handle. Please do not leave any more bags here. Well, people may like books. We're not so sure about their reading because there had to be added to this stop. We're no longer accepting paper bags. So reading is fundamental at Robin's library. And I'll leave you now on a futuristic note. Reimagining our libraries. This is a project that's taken place. This is one possible view. Not no contracts have been signed. Don't get excited yet. There's a lot of work ahead of us, but a vision to rejuvenating the Fox branch library and adding much needed space and using the space differently in a 21st century way. And here's one possibility of adding a glass cube to the rear of the 1931 library extension. So re-imagine our libraries we do. And we're not gonna say goodbye. In these times of COVID with the library closed, we're not gonna say goodbye. We're simply gonna say au revoir. Thank you very much. Thank you, Richard. That was just amazing. It's wonderful to hear your compilation of history. Beginning in the early days and then taking us almost into the future. Well, it was a pleasure. I'm wondering whether we can organize some questions. There is a Q&A box and I would like to invite people to put their questions there. Maybe just to give people a little more time to do that, I could ask a question of my own. And that relates to the opening of the library. Was it originally only opened for Arlington residents or was it for the public in general? You're talking in the very early days in the early 19th century. Yes, it was very much for the town and more specifically for the, what they would sometimes call people who are the scholars of the town. So if there was a private school in the town, which there was, there was a private academy for young ladies of the town. They would have the ability by virtue of living at the school of being considered residents, even if their parents were not. But it was not a general facility. And more to that point, Arlington was pretty remote. There was no train service. There was no horse-drawn trolley car. So getting way out here to the hinterlands of Arlington would have been difficult to put it mildly. So even if they, even if they could have come, they remember there was no reading room. So they would not have been able to take a book out. So I do have a question here from Jean. There's a bust statue of a man and two children in the Robbins library. Is this Eli Robbins and his two sons and was the sculptor silent? Well, that answer is known, yes. I believe you're referring to the plaster cast of the statue that is called My Boys. And I believe that those are the sons of Cyrus Dallin. And one of them was named Lawrence. And I'm going to now misspeak and give them names that weren't their names. But no, it is not. It would be very touching, actually, to somehow remember the boys of Maria and Eli. But I thought it was important during this talk to bring them forward where they haven't been perhaps seen before. Thank you. Another question from Anna. Actually, what happened to the chandeliers? Do we know that? Would you believe they were probably sold for scrap? That would just be something you would do with that. It might have even been too expensive to electrify them. So looking at them and the kind of light they were providing, there were a lot of complaints about the light in the reading room, obviously the artificial light at nighttime. The room is flooded with light during the daytime. And it was decided that they just were old hat. And so that's just, that's one of the features. Those were viewed almost more as appliances. But when the decision came to do the interior of the library over again, reproduction fixtures were selected to recreate that feeling, yet provide, deliver our 20, first and well, then 20th century expectations for artificial lighting. And I wanted to mention one thing that I had left out of my talk. If you can imagine, I left something out. And that is that when the library was built, Maria Robbins had provided the funds for the building of the library. It was $100,000. But I must not forget her brother. Edwin Farmer, because he provided the $50,000 that was needed to provide books and furnishings for the inside of the library. It never would have done to have had a great big building that sat there empty, waiting for the town to little by little pull together the money to do it. So I certainly don't want to overlook. It was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was great to have the opportunity to, to do it. So I certainly don't want to overlook. It was Maria Farmer Robbins. And, and her brother Edwin Farmer, who, who together enabled the library to open its doors in 1892. Another question. Who developed the idea of a Minuteman network? Well, the Minuteman network came about in the 80s. bit here. I wish I had a librarian at my side. Librarians are so valuable. A masked librarian, of course. But in any event, Minuteman Library came about rather as a result of two things. One would be Proposition Two and a Half that put a lot of restrictions on libraries everywhere. It wasn't just in Arlington. So it became a way for libraries to share their collections and make them accessible to other people. A side benefit, one that wasn't heavily advertised, is that when libraries were closed at certain times in one's town, you could look around to a neighboring town and go make use of their library there. And that was very valuable. And it also coincided with connectivity, early days of computer connectivity that enabled the catalogs to be viewable, to understand if there was a book you wanted that wasn't available at your library, what library could you request it of, and where the great book exchanges between the libraries could start to happen. So that was a product of that. Interlibrary loan always existed. It existed from the early part of the 20th century, but it was an extremely limited kind of thing. It was the Minuteman Library consortium that really made that fly. The next question is, do we know what happened to the card catalog furniture? Was it given to the community? I don't know what happened to the card catalog furniture. I can tell you that the card catalogs, just as I mentioned earlier with the combination gaslight and electric light fixtures, you wanted to have the gaslight there because the electricity wasn't that reliable. People lived in dread of the computer going down, and then how would we ever find a book? So we held on to the card catalogs for rather a long time after their useful life was over. And I honestly don't know what became of them. I think like a lot of equipment, the catalogs were not fine furniture. They were pieces of equipment designed for a specific purpose. So I don't know that they would have readily found another home anywhere in the community. And I will let you know that appropriately enough, there is one card catalog, at least still in active use in Robbins Library. That is up in the local history room because the Arlington Advocate is indexed in bound volume form up to 1946. And then on handwritten index cards, catalog cards, into the 1980s. So if you needed to try your luck and look for something that might have been indexed, you can still consult a card catalog today. One other question about Firefly. Was there a gold statue version of Firefly? Somebody said they thought they had seen such in an earlier photograph of the third desk. No, I just think Firefly was well-lit, shall we say. But no, I don't believe that Firefly was ever gold. She was just rather shiny when she was new. And I can assure you that in her position in front of the circulation desk that there was no rubbing of Firefly allowed. One more question from Joe. What is your earliest memory of visiting Arlington Library? Well, I grew up in Winchester. So my earliest memory of visiting Arlington Library was I was part of what was called, in high schools, I was called Yakberg, which a very unattractive name. It stood for the Young Adult Cooperative Book Review Group. And we were a pilot program, the different young adult librarians participated in a three times a year book review group. And they decided to invite some students, and I happen to be one of the lucky five to be chosen on a pilot program, to engage in contributing reviews to books. And librarians used to depend on these book reviews to drive some of their purchasing decisions. So that brought me around to the different libraries, such as Medford and also to Arlington. And I remember, as a young person, when I came into the Arlington Library, because Arlington, again, in my high school years had a population of 50,000 people, and Winchester had about 20,000 people. And so Arlington was a little bit of the, of the, not the big city that would be exaggerating, but it was a, it was quite a large place and it had quite a large library. But what I remember was what a crowded library it was, because it really was packed to the gills, try to imagine a community about with about 20% more population than we have today, fitting just into the buildings that I showed you earlier today. And that would give you an idea of what it was like to be inside Robin's Library. And when I moved to Arlington in the early 80s, and when I bought my first home here in the 80s, I became very interested in Arlington history. And I can remember when the local history room really was the janitor's closet, and it was stuck in the basement somewhere, no climate control, and exposed brick walls, and I don't mean that in an attractive sense, and steam pipes cutting through it and things like that. And yet it was amazing the work that we managed to get out, despite the fact the physical plant was no great shakes at certain points in its history, the staff was always remarkable. And that's been a constant and I can testify to that. Must admit that I was amazed that there was such a grand building built for a population of 5600. There you go. Generosity brings great things. Right. So I think that's about it for the questions. Wonderful. So once again, thank you. That was just a fantastic presentation. It always amazes me the way you managed to take all of these diverse pieces of information and weave them together into a very coherent story. Thank you very much, Sally. It was a pleasure, and I have one last confession to make to the audience. I could not read what was on the screen, and that's something I'm going to resolve for the future. This is my first Zoom. I want to thank ACMI for their cooperation and helping us to get on the air. I want to thank the friends for having me. But I'm just going to give myself a big pat on the back because how I managed to give this talk without being able to read my material, I'm going to go home and celebrate as I watch the vice presidential debate. So thank you, Sally, very much. Thank you, Anna. Thank you, everyone. Thank you very much. And thank you to our audience. I would just like to add that if you've enjoyed the program this evening and are not already a member of the friends, of course I have to get in a plug for the friends. Of course you do. Then it helped to bring more events like this by becoming a member. Richard has very generously donated his time tonight, but we're not always that fortunate. You can find more information about the membership on our website, friendsofrobbinslibrary.org. And I'd just like to thank Anna, Anna Lytton, and Jeff Monroe for their help tonight. We've had a few hiccups, but it was just been fantastic that we've been able to get through all of this. And we've had an audience of some 80-plus people tonight, so it's really done well. Thank you again to Richard and to everybody else in our audience. Stay safe, stay healthy, and have a very good night.