The Conway County Library — which started thanks to the vision of a Morrilton women’s club — will turn 100 in 2016, and a year-long celebration is planned.
“It’s a big year for the library,” Director Jay Carter said.
The centennial celebration will kick off at noon Thursday at the library at 101 W. Church St. in Morrilton.
A joint city-county proclamation will be issued, declaring 2016 the Conway County Library Centennial Year, Carter said.
“We’re going to try to get as many people as we can here so we can get a nice photo in front of the building,” he said.
The Conway County Library is one of two public libraries in Arkansas still operating in their original Carnegie buildings. The other is in Eureka Springs.
The year-long celebration will include a different theme each month, Carter said.
“We’ve got part of the year planned. It will be divided up by decades. January will be 1900-1910, basically. The theme is going to be Conway County history — automobiles, that type of thing,” he said. February will focus on the 1920s.
“When we get into the ’50s, the big theme will be ’50s automobiles, diners and the advent of interstates and modern roads — transportation will be a big part of it, locally, especially,” Carter said.
On the third Wednesday of each month, the library will host special Lunch and Learns to reflect that month’s theme, Carter said. The Arkansas Department of Heritage will send a speaker each month to talk about the history of Conway County and the library.
Businesses will be asked to sponsor a month, Carter said, and to create gift baskets to be given away.
“I’m going to be doing a lot of fundraising this year to help with that,” he said.
The Carnegie Foundation gave a grant of $10,000 to build the library, said Linda Green, director of youth and outreach services. She has done research for the library’s centennial.
It was a group of women, though, whom Conway County has to thank for getting it all started.
In 1897, a women’s club in Morrilton called the Pathfinder Club was established. In addition to bringing arts and music to the community, one of the group’s main goals was to establish a library.
The members collected books and moved them from one member’s house to another. The Pathfinders began meeting at a church and housed a library there as early as 1911, Green said. In the early years, people who wanted to use the library had to be sponsored by a Pathfinder Club member and pay a fee, which went to purchase books.
“By 1913, the library was public and has always been free to everyone [since],” Green said.
Morrilton resident W.S. Cazort was given 1,800 rare books, called the Porter Collection, from a Chicago engraver. Cazort loaned the books and later sold the books to the Pathfinder Club.
The Pathfinder Club applied to the Carnegie Foundation for a grant to build a new library and, in September 1915, Morrilton received $10,000, a “matching grant,” Green said, that had requirements that didn’t include cash. The requirements included Pathfinder members as staff, the land that already was purchased and a guarantee of perpetual financial support for the library from the city.
The Conway County Library opened in October 1916.
The library has undergone only three renovations, the most recent in 2011. The $150,000 renovation included repainting the building and replacing doors to be historically accurate to 1916, Carter said, and a copper roof was put on an overhang to the emergency exit in the basement on the east side of the building.
Carter said 90 to 95 percent of the building is original.
The new year will see changes and updates to the building.
Plans are underway for an addition to the library to the south toward the parking lot.
“Everything that we’re doing now is geared toward an eventual 4,800-square-foot expansion,” Carter said. “It’s going to be huge. We’re talking about having a community room to hold 80 people, with its own kitchen.
“The library is only about 3,400 square feet; we’re maxed out to our capacity as far as our collection, the amount of computers we can have, space for meetings, programs. We’re constantly having to find other locations to do programs.”
The new meeting room will have a side door to accommodate after-hours meetings, he said.
Green agreed that more library space is needed.
“The library has stood steadfast as an icon in the community for 100 years, but with that beautiful history, the downside of being a historical property is lack of space, lack of new technology and lack of cooperative community-learning spaces,” Green said.
Carter said Morrilton native John Allison of Allison Architects of Little Rock has drawn plans for the library’s expansion.
Green said the expansion provides a way to remain true to the library’s historical heritage, “while embracing a future to support the community into the next 100 years.”
The Conway County Library has approximately 38,000 items in its collection, and that includes books and audio books for all ages, Carter said.
“A huge part of our collection now are blu-rays and DVDs. We have a huge collection of those, and we do have popular movies that appear in the theaters. We get those as soon as they come out.”
Carter said the library also has a large e-book collection, about 6,000 titles and growing.
He said the library is part of an e-book consortium with five other library systems.
In January, the library will add an e-magazine subscription, he said.
“It’s something new,” he said. People can go to the
website and choose from 50 titles available each month for people to check out, and they will have access to the magazine’s archives.
Carter said anyone with a valid library card can check out magazines such as Newsweek or People and read them on a Kindle, a tablet or a smartphone. The magazines will be available for a period of time, and “they can check the item back in, or it disappears off their device,” Carter said.
In February, the library will take possession of its bookmobile that is being built in Wisconsin, he said, adding that a driver will be hired later in the year.
A committee will be assembled, “and the plan is to cover all points of the county in a one-month time frame,” he said. Carter said the area served by the bookmobile will include Petit Jean Mountain near Morrilton.
“We’ll be taking it to places like fire departments, churches, schools, little convenience stores. We’ll contact these locations and make sure we can park the bookmobile there,” Carter said.
Carter said he will focus on fundraising and grant-writing to meet the library’s goals for 2016.
“We’ve got our work cut out for us,” he said. “We aim to please and serve the community the best way we can. We’ve been serving the community from the same location for a hundred years; we are embedded into this community, and we want to further that by bringing the library further into the 21st century.”
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.