The most significant event that happened in Frankfort in 1908 was the opening of our first public library. On December 12, 1908, the library opened on the seventh floor of the McClure Building.
Planning for the library started several years before. In 1906 Lilian Lindsey was at a meeting in Mount Sterling and heard a lecture about public libraries. Inspired, she came home and convinced the Frankfort Woman’s Club to start a public library here. They started gathering books and storing them in Lindsey’s home, the Vest-Lindsey House. Faced with the problem that there were no funds available to hire a librarian, Lindsey went out of state for training in library science so she could fulfill that role on a volunteer basis.
We are now proudly celebrating our centennial. An important part of this Centennial Celebration will be to honor the two women’s organizations in our community that were key to library use in earlier days. The Frankfort Woman’s Club, under Lindsey’s guidance, established the library and managed it until 1965. In 1955, the Franklin County Homemakers Clubs, in cooperation with the State Department of Libraries, initiated the countywide bookmobile. The Homemakers managed the bookmobile until 1965, when the library and the bookmobile operations were merged to form the Paul Sawyier Public Library.
As part of the Centennial Celebration, we have established an Oral History Project, “Memories of the Library.” In the coming months we will invite community members to record stories about the library in earlier days.