EARLY HISTORY OF MOUNT DESERT ISLAND MAINE: STORY OF THE JESUP MEMORIAL LIBRARY

THE JESUP MEMORIAL LIBRARY
Bar Harbor Times
Jan. 23, 1915

JESUP MEMORIAL LIBRARY

Bar Harbor Has One Of The Finest Buildings In State And 11,000 Volumes Are To Be Found On Its Shelves - It Is Supported Largely By Endowment.

Bar Harbor has a public library of which it may well be proud. It is the outgrowth of 30 years of devoted labor on the part of summer residents and citizens crowned by Mrs. Morris K. Jesup's memorial gift of a permanent and fitting home. Here about 11,000 volumes of standard literature, works of history, encyclopedias, and late popular fiction are to be found in the beautiful home supported by the endowment fund given by Mrs. Jesup besides the annual appropriation of the town and receipts from the subscriptions of non-resident readers. The library was dedicated in August, 1911 and was occupied soon thereafter.
No more delightful place for reading or for quiet study exists in America today than the silent spacious rooms this building offer designed for the purpose with the greatest care and with wide knowledge of what had been accomplished elsewhere. The library, built to endure, of stone and brick, and with exceeding thoroughness of workmanship to all detail, is situated centrally and pleasantly on Mount Desert Street with churches opposite, the Y.W.C.A. given by Mrs. Kennedy as its next neighbor, and an old fashioned hardy garden, lawns and shrubbery enclosing it. No more fitting setting for a library could well be found.

JESUP MEMORIAL LIBRARY
BAR HARBOR, MAINE

Within the main reading room is long and spacious, equipped with a silent floor of cork and paneled in dark oak, quiet and restful to the eye. A long oak table, lighted from above, reaches down the length of the room, for magazine or other reading, while on either side the room is divided into alcoves - still, secluded spots for reading, each with its own window opening pleasantly out on lawn and garden, each with its own chairs and table and open stack of books. Easy flights of stairs lead up also from the floor of this main reading room to a gallery - wide as the alcoves depth below - extending round the room upon three sides, where there are further open stacks from floor to ceiling; and all these stacks, the lower and the upper both, are full of well selected books.
Two other rooms exist upon this floor. The one upon the right upon entering was built by Mrs. Jesup for a special horticultural purpose, to hold a library of valuable and useful books on horticultural subjects and to offer opportunity for their ready consultation or longer study.
In addition to this special library, and to supplement its purposes, the directors of the library intend this room to hold also the best and most complete collection they can form of plant and landscape photographs, a thing that has never yet been competently done by any library in the world so far as they have knowledge and in which they ask the aid of others, as they have opportunity to obtain such photographs, to help them in achieving.

JESUP MEMORIAL LIBRARY
BAR HARBOR MAINE

The room is admirably lighted for the purpose of high and ample windows; it looks pleasantly and appropriately down under the garden of the library, on its western side, and is furnished with an ample table for its study of photographs or larger books. It is of easy access also from the street, for owners of estates or gardens to consult readily its books of reference in passing.
The other room on the main floor, the one upon the left on entering is the children's room, devoted to their use exclusively. their books alone fill its shelves, which lie open to them to look through and make selection from according to the interest the books excite. In this way only can a library be made a thing of living, stimulating interest to children, as everyone who looks back to the companionship of books in his own childhood knows; and it is good, at the right time and season, to see how well it answers here.
The basement of the library, which opens out most pleasantly upon the lower level of its lawns and garden, contains - accessible from without as well as from the floor above, an admirable room for meetings, and an excellently lighted stack room, large as the main reading room above, where the books not needed on the open shelves upon the upper floor can be kept in safety and readily got at as they are wanted.

JESUP MEMORIAL LIBRARY
BAR HARBOR, MAINE

The library is freely open to all visitors and readers, from 9 in the morning until 9 at night in summer, and 10 in the morning until 9 at night in the winter - except on Sundays, when it is open in the afternoon for reading only. An experienced librarian - or librarian's assistant - is always there, within these hours, who will assist in finding any books required for reading or for study in the library or who will give out books upon request for reading elsewhere.
The books the library offers represent a long labor of love on the part of the purchasing community, thoughtful selection stretching over many years and made by men and women of the widest reading. The best of the older literature is there, and the best of the new books that each succeeding year has brought, both light and serious. A number of the most valuable books of reference in the English language were also added to the shelves of the new building when the older library was moved there, through the generous interest of summer residents, and it can now be truly called a scholar's library as well as one of general literature and popular character.

JESUP MEMORIAL LIBRARY
BAR HARBOR, MAINE

The aim of the directors is to make the library, with its admirable new equipment and its slow building up from small beginnings through a generation's work and interest, serve now the widest possible ends - both in the town's own life and in that of its summer residents and visitors; to make it useful in the broadest sense, a source of wholesome interest and pleasure, means of education and an instrument in aid of study; but above all, to make it serve as an awakening suggestion of the higher life of thought and feeling into which the world's great literature, both old and new, is - next to inspiring human contact - the torch bearer and single guide.