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2012-06-01

A Historical Look Back at the Creston Public Library

Featured in I Love Creston Magazine - Feb, 2011
Tammy Hardwick - Manager - Creston & District Museum & Archives
In a couple of months, the Creston Public Library will celebrate its 92nd birthday. Its earliest direct predecessor, a lending library established by the Creston Women’s Institute, opened on April 3, 1919.

I would like to salute the many volunteers and supporters who have kept the library operating since that time. Not only have they fought a Herculean battle against a constant lack of funding, space, personnel and other resources, they have had to contend with a library whose wanderings rival those of Gulliver and Odysseus.

The Women’s Institute library started in the former Fruit Growers Union building on Canyon Street, about where the Other Side Café is today, with 58 books. When the ladies turned their library over to the newly-formed Creston Public Library Association a year later they had 250 volumes. Another 300 had been received from Victoria when the new library opened in the union building in December 1920.

Bad weather, of all things, forced the library to move to its second home just four years later. On December 11, 1924, a gale with winds of 60 miles per hour struck the Creston Valley. It caused extensive damage throughout the district and, according to a report in the Creston Review, the “Creston Public Library building was completely wrecked, but the books have been mostly recovered in not too bad shape.”

Needless to say, the library closed until temporary quarters could be found – upstairs in the Speers store, located where RE/MAX and Black Bear Books are today. By April 1925 this temporary space had become a permanent arrangement.
The next four years were difficult for the library, which was caught in a vicious circle of shortages. New books could be had for free from Victoria but the cost of shipping them had to be paid by the local library. The library’s only revenues were its membership fees, but these were not enough to cover the shipping costs and without new books, attracting and keeping members was impossible. In 1929, the library association decided to ask village council to take over.

Council felt it was not legally able to take over the library. It did, however, allow the library to move its books into the village hall on 11th Avenue North (about where the warehouse for Creston Card and Stationery is today), built shelves to hold the books and promised cash grants when necessary, providing the library’s membership warranted it. The library accepted the offer and opened in its third home on April 19, 1930.
At this point things get a little murky. Two sources ignore the stop in the Speers store and state that the library moved directly from the union building to a house on 11th Avenue North, somewhere near the Legion, and from there into village hall across the street in the mid-1930s.

One article says it stopped operating altogether for a few years in the early 1930s. As best I can tell, home No. 3 was the village hall in 1930, No. 4 the house near the Legion in dates unknown (with possibly a closure at some point before or after this move), No. 5 in the mid- or late-1930s back across the street to the map room at village hall and then up the hill to home No. 6 at what is now Adam Robertson Elementary School.

In 1941, Creston was one of several B.C. villages with a “school-community library,” with the services of a part-time school librarian as well as student volunteers, at least in the summer. This situation probably didn’t last long as the library was overcrowded and the public was complaining about the long walk to the school.

So its contents were bundled up and shipped off again to its seventh location: back to the village hall on 11th Avenue. Apparently, this time it was set up in the firehall on the village hall site, where “space was adequate, but the heating was not,” according to an article in the Creston Valley Advance. It was heated by means of a wood fire which was extinguished after hours and re-lit every morning.

The resulting wild fluctuations in temperature and humidity caused considerable damage to the books, many of which simply fell apart.
In 1948, village council purchased the former Bank of Commerce building on Canyon Street (now Willis Jordan Financial block) for its new village hall. The library followed it to this location sometime after 1948 and was at first housed on the main floor. However, demand for more space – either for the library or for village council, depending on which account you believe – led to the removal of the library to the top floor of the building.

By 1965, village council was again running short of space so it petitioned the library to move, this time to the former Al Hendren home on Vancouver Street, which council had recently purchased and moved to the back of the lot. This space proved to be completely inadequate so the Creston-Erickson Centennial Committee began working on plans to build a proper library building.

With the help of grants and many donations from people all over the Creston Valley, the committee succeeded. Centennial Library, located where Swan Valley Lodge is now, opened on September 16, 1967. It was lauded as one of the finest small-community libraries in the province, and comments from people who remember it certainly back that up. The library, by then at its 11th location, finally had a home that was purpose-built for it.

Centennial Library served the community well for 25 years. By 1992, Creston’s per capita library use was one of the highest in the province, and had been for many years. This success had been achieved despite the never-ending story of funding and staffing challenges; one local resident recalls that, at one point, the library was only open one day a week because its resources were so meagre. And there were more clouds on the horizon.

Swan Valley Lodge needed to expand, and the property where stood the library, and a new town hall built in 1972, was sold to allow for it. Town council moved into its present building on 10th Avenue North and the library had to find a new home.

Some argued that this move would have been inevitable, regardless of what happened with Swan Valley Lodge, because the library had grown so much that it needed a larger space. But the decision to sell and demolish a fine building which the community had built created a lot of bitterness.

After considering a number of options, the library association bought the former Jehovah’s Witness Hall on Seventh Avenue North and reopened there in November 1992. This was, ironically enough, intended to be only a temporary home, as the association was hard at work on plans to construct a new building on the corner of the Rec Centre grounds.

Those plans fell through, though, and the library stayed in its “temporary” home for 14 years before moving to its present location on 16th Avenue South in 2006.

Wow. Thirteen locations in 92 years, and some of them occupied barely long enough to get things unpacked. It gives a new meaning to the term “circulating library,” doesn’t it?

For more information contact the Creston and District Museum and Archives:
phone (250) 428-9262 e-mail mail@creston.museum.bc.ca;
Web site www.creston.museum.bc.ca

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Comments

posted by: KC2011-02-02 04:37:24
It's always interesting to see how things playout over the course of time.

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