Libraries in Humboldt
(far left) Eureka’s old Carnegie Library on F Street, now the site of the Morris Graves Museum.
In traditional societies, practical information and entertaining stories were passed on orally by the group elders. When writing was adopted, this material was written down and passed on through books, scrolls or clay tablets. So then some place was needed to keep these things – hence libraries.
Libraries have long been central to our lives. After all, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World was the Great Library of Alexandria. Of course not all libraries have been quite so grand, but, several millennia later, when European Americans settled in Humboldt County during the 1850s, libraries were a value they brought with them.
In February of 1859, a group of local worthies formed the Humboldt Library Association. They became shareholders in a “private subscription” library, though the library itself was actually free and open to the public. Initially this library was housed in a couple of rented rooms in a building on Eureka’s Third Street where the Ritz now stands. A similar enterprise began in Arcata in 1860, and soon other communities followed suit. In some outlying towns, the library began as a room or several shelves in a local store or private home.
In 1878, a new formulation, the Eureka Free Library, took over and became the first free public library in California. Its rental location changed several times as its patronage and collection grew. Library open hours were from 9 am to 11 pm six days a week. The entire staff consisted of one librarian earning $25 a month for his 85 hour work week.
By the turn of the century, library facilities were again inadequate for the demands of patrons and the growing collection, and a drive was launched to create a new library building. The Chamber of Commerce and others petitioned steel baron and philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie, to help build a library here as he had in communities across the nation. In November of 1904, a grand ceremony was held opening the library on F Street built in a style distinctive to Carnegie libraries elsewhere. This building, now on the National Register of Historic Places, today houses the Morris Graves Museum.
A county library system was established in 1914 and eventually merged with the Eureka library, but again the collections began straining the available space. Eventually the Carnegie building was limited to the administrative offices while the circulating book collection moved into the basement of the courthouse.
Still our population and love for reading continued to grow, and eventually public and private funds were raised to build a new larger facility. Site selection came down to a choice between Coopers Gulch and a bluff east of the Carson Mansion. A heated public debate ensued over questions of traffic safety and vagrancy, but eventually the waterfront site won, and in 1995, the present Humboldt County Library opened to much celebration. It became the mother of eleven branch libraries and center of a wide bookmobile network serving outlying communities.
Library technology, of course, has changed a great deal since the days of clay tablets and the Great Library of Alexandria, but the human love for libraries has remained the same. And those wanting to learn more about our library history are urged to come to another local archive, the Humboldt County Historical Society, where we house information about this and all aspects of Humboldt’s past.