The Legacy

By 1940, the population of Kentucky was 2.8 million, and half of those individuals were served by WPA libraries. (Jeffrey 2001) The 80,016 registered borrowers were still below ALA standards, but not when one considers the immense challenges the WPA library project faced, including geographic difficulties, quality of book supply, the newness of some patrons’ reading habits, and the constant challenge of convincing individuals to make use of the WPA library services.

May V. Kunz, director of the WPA statewide library projects wrote in the December, 1941, issue of the bulletin of the Kentucky Library Association wrote of these challenges faced by the project, in addition to personnel difficulties. Not only was there a shortage of supervisors, due to federal regulations that permitted only 5% of WPA employees to serve in a supervisory role, but she stressed that it was important to remember that the WPA “librarians” were rarely trained professionals. Trained librarians served in supervisory roles, and the project took what Ms. Kunz called a “business-like” approach to staffing by hiring the most qualified personnel to ensure smooth operations. (Jeffrey 2001) She insisted that the project’s staff were referred to as “library clerks” rather than “librarians.” (Jeffrey 2001)

In terms of the project’s collections, not only was equal distribution of resources among counties a problem, but so was quality of materials. At the time of Ms. Kunz’s writing, she lamented that less than 15,000 of the project’s 22,000 owned reading materials were of use. (Jeffrey 2001) Nevertheless, Ms. Kunz wrote of these challenges not to declare the project a failure — which it was not — but rather, to provide context for its measurements of success and for the criticism it faced.

Despite its challenges, the legacy of the WPA Pack Horse Library Project can be seen to this day. In 1952, the Kentucky General Assembly passed the Rural Libraries Law, which authorized state aid to local libraries in rural areas. $110,000 was appropriated, with the potential for individual grants of up to $5,000. (Onkst 2012) At the time, 48 Kentucky counties had no library services, only 20% of the rural population had library services, and half of all books in Kentucky Public Libraries were housed in Jefferson County, which is today the most populous county in Kentucky, and home to the city of Louisville, one of the commonwealth’s largest cities. (Onkst 2012) Rural access to libraries was still a challenge, but progress was on the move. Bookmobiles began to spread across the commonwealth, beginning with a donation of 7 bookmobiles for the Library Extension Division by Mary Belknap Gray of Louisville in the late 1940s, and the 1953 donation of 84 bookmobiles by the Friends of Kentucky Libraries. (Onkst 2012)

Since then, Kentucky has led the nation in its bookmobile quantity, aided in part by the Pack Horse Library project legacy, which created a precedent for establishing libraries where none had existed previously, and a precedent for overcoming challenges in access to library services. While it is not clearly known why bookmobiles were an option for library extension work where they were not previously, one could assume that improvements in infrastructure aided their work.

Not only did extension work grow significantly, but public library establishment grew, as well, from 37 public libraries in 1944 to 98 in 1958, with circulation of materials more than tripling during this time. (Onkst 2012) We cannot argue that it was just the WPA project that caused this boom in library expansion, especially because the end of the Depression and WWII created the economic conditions that facilitated such an expansion, however the immense popularity of the project, the impact it had on regional health and hygiene standards, and the subsequent growth in library extension, public libraries, and circulation all speak to the powerful legacy left by the WPA project.