Chittenden Public Library: Where cozy meets community

Written by Joanna Tebbs Young

I just love our library! It’s a warm, welcoming and cozy place to visit and we all know each other there. It really is the heart of our little town and the fact that it is part of the school is a wonderful bonus. I feel grateful to be part of the library community. — Sarah Quint, President of the Chittenden Public Library Board

On a recent Saturday, 185 years, almost to the day, after library trustees first made 188 books housed at the home of their inaugural librarian, E.J. Perry, available to the public, snow quietly falls outside the library at Chittenden’s Barstow Memorial School. Inside it is equally quiet. With its six tall windows looking out on fields and trails at the edge of the Green Mountain National Forest, decorative lamps hanging from a barrelled ceiling, and cozy chairs nestled between wooden bookshelves, the atmosphere of the small library is serene.

But the lull is temporary.

Suddenly the wide front door swings open and a wave of children sweep in, travel mug-toting parents at their heels. A little girl in a red coat immediately plops a thick board book on the librarian’s desk, wanting to check it out before going to “read” it in the play nook surrounded by bins of colorful picture books. While her two older brothers excitedly scan the list of tasks on the volunteers’ checklist, three girls head toward the comfy couch in front of the impressive fireplace at the back of the library. Meanwhile, the adults, all on a first-name basis, chat about the weather and the latest book on their To-Be-Read pile.

And from his portrait above the mantel, a man looking far older than his thirty-something years, gazes across the scene. The man, born in 1895 in New York City to William Slocum Barstow — one of the nation’s leading electrical engineers and philanthropists of the early 20th century — and his wife, Francoise Duclos, is Frederic Duclos Barstow.

The Barstows come to Chittenden

In 1900, after two Rutland entrepreneurs had financed a small dam on East Creek in Pittsford to power a hydroelectric station four years earlier, the newly formed Chittenden Power Company (CPC) began construction on the Chittenden Dam. However, when the New York investor who had acquired the company in 1901 ran short of money, construction stalled.

In 1906, William S. Barstow, who had recently purchased Rutland Railway Light & Power Company, was visiting friends summering at Lefferts Pond when he surveyed the unfinished dam. Founder of two gas and electric corporations, president of thirty light, power, and gas companies throughout the eastern U.S. and director of another fifty, he decided to add CPC to his collection. Construction soon resumed and the dam and reservoir were completed in 1909.

By then the Barstows — including their son, Frederic — had fallen in love with Chittenden.

Ten years later, Frederic was home from the war suffering irreversible lung damage from toxic gas exposure. Moving out of the city on his doctor’s recommendation, Frederic settled in Chittenden and established the Vermont Silver Fox Company. Meanwhile, at a hunting camp on his son’s property (now Fox Creek Inn), Mr. Barstow was entertaining the likes of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Harvey Firestone.

In 1929, exactly two months before the stock market crash, through some stroke of luck or foresight, William Barstow sold his two companies for $50 million, and at age sixty-three retired to become a professional philanthropist.

Two years later, at age thirty-five, Frederic died. Since he, like his mother, had been a strong supporter of education, his parents decided to build a school and library in his memory.

Chittenden Public Library

By that time, Chittenden’s library had been providing the community with reading material for almost forty years, moving the books between houses as the librarianship changed hands. But in 1933, when the Barstows built the school in memory of their son — the first union school in the state — they included a library, a self-contained room with a separate entrance, which was stocked with books from the town library and Frederic’s own collection.

In 1949, in an agreement drawn up between Mrs. Barstow and the Joint Board of School Directors of Chittenden, Mendon, and Pittsford, the following stipulations were included:

1. The library portion of the building could be used for no other purpose than a library
2. A trained librarian was to be employed
3. No less than $50 per fiscal year was to be spent on new books
4. The library should be open to the public for at least three days per week for not less than three hours per day

And thus the Chittenden Public Library (CPL) was born, a separate financial entity from the school and one of only a handful of other public libraries in Vermont that share space and books with its school library. While the two libraries shared a librarian for many years, in the 1980s when the State instituted a requirement that school librarians undergo specific training and could not simultaneously run both a school and public library, the CPL Trustees hired their own certified librarian.

CPL today

Today, CPL has over 450 patrons and spends approximately $2,000 annually on new books, and due to its participation in the Vermont Interlibrary Loan courier program, Chittenden’s patrons can borrow from libraries around the state.

With the help of a small army of volunteers — many of whom are Barstow students — CPL’s Board and staff try to offer at least one event per month for kids and seniors, such as Story Hours, Book Clubs, and a variety of creative workshops. Bigger events such as Harvest Fest, Garden Walks, a Summer reading program, and Story Walks (one of which, threatened by rain, was moved inside to loop through the school hallways), also punctuate the annual calendar.

Says Assistant Director, Theresa Czachor, “This library is still very important to the community, especially one of this size. There is value in having people who are qualified to run a program, who are passionate about libraries, putting books in the hands of everybody — kids, adults, seniors, anybody who wants to read. This library’s been here for many years and it’s still growing.”

“We have quite a little treasure here,” says Luvia Webster who has been involved with CPL for over twenty years, including serving as Board President and now as Secretary of the Friends of the Library, a group which most recently raised the money for the Little Free Library at the Chittenden Grange. Sarah Rich, mother of four avid readers, agrees: “The library provides a sanctuary. It still feels special, like we are in a VIP Club we get to go to every Saturday as a family. We are obsessed with the library and I can’t tell you how much time I have spent there and how much it has given to me. We love the library; librarians are the unsung heroes of our community.”

When Frederic Barstow looks over the little library his mother created in his memory, his spirit is surely pleased with all the joy and education he has helped bring to the tiny community of Chittenden, Vermont for so many years and many more to come.

Chittenden Public Library is located at 223 Chittenden Road, Chittenden, VT 05737 and is open to the public Monday, Wednesday, and Thurs 3- 6 pm, and Saturday 9am – 12 pm. They can be reached at chittendenpl@gmail.com, 802-773-3531, and on Facebook.