Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series by Herald columnist Peggy Keener on Austin Public Library’s history. Look for Part 2 in the Sunday Herald.

If you have the farcical notion that the Austin Public Library magically appeared one day, then you, my fellow citizens, are sorely mistaken. As with all things truly worthwhile, it took the unwavering commitment of a single-minded, steel-backboned woman to make our priceless library happen, proving once again the power of one.

Let’s go back in history. The day is March 16, 1869. Austin is a new western town encircling a primitive public square that is little more than a thicket of scrub oak and hazel brush. The streets radiating out from it could best be described as rutted wagon trails. It is a frigid, stormy day making the deeply scarred roads nearly impassible. If this alone is not dreary enough, an epidemic of diphtheria is raging throughout the town. Perhaps it is the very cheerlessness of the heavy gloom that finally forces the issue as Esther Mitchell Morse finds herself struggling to keep warm in front of her fireplace and longing for a place to find a good book to read. There is none.

This scene took place 147 years ago, a time when books were scarce (especially for the masses) and there was nowhere that Esther could go to borrow one. So, rather than lamenting what was not hers, Mrs. Morse got out of her rocker and went to work. She began by contacting a group of like-minded Austin women. At their first meeting, Esther opened her black silk reticule and withdrew a draft form containing a two-pronged mission: create a society for the study of floriculture (to beautify the town) and establish a circulating library (to beautify the town’s minds). It was the first official meeting of the Austin Ladies Floral Club.

Today this nearly century and a half old organization is the longest continuously running women’s club in Minnesota, as well as the second consistently uninterrupted women’s club in the United States. Mrs. Morse was its president for an astonishing (alarming?) 32 years!

Who was this steely-spined woman? Esther Morse was born into a highly educated family in Maine and came to Austin as the wife of Alfred Morse, the Austin Congregational minister. A published poetess and writer, she was dismayed to find in her new small hamlet, a dismal lack of culture. So, she gathered together twenty-nine other women and formed the original Ladies Floral Club. Dues were 25 cents a year and the women met in the members’ homes.

The newly formed club formulated a plan to hold a flower show the following August with the purpose of raising money for books. It worked. Their first sale was a single red geranium with which the first volume was purchased. At the end of the sale the group had sold $100 worth of flowers and seed packets, and with the money they purchased 123 books! (Pause now to reflect on just how many seeds must have been sold to earn that $100, as well as how cheap the hardcover books were at only 81 cents each!) Additionally, 103 more volumes were donated by local citizens. Those 226 books created the nucleus for the first Austin library.

The search then began for a place they could call their library. Eight months later the ladies moved their collection of books into a room on the second floor of the courthouse. Each club member served in turn as a rotating librarian for one afternoon a week.

A year later — with the distasteful pall of the jailhouse one floor below — the ladies deemed this location unsuitable. With no place to go, three of the women volunteered to store the books in their homes; books which had by then burgeoned to a startling 1,060 volumes! For nearly fifteen years, these three determined ladies rotated the books amongst their homes. Fifteen years! Talk about dedication to a cause! Talk about groaning floor boards! Talk about complaining husbands!

Finally in 1884, upon the completion of a new courthouse, the books were at last moved into the courthouse basement where they remained for the next twenty years. Peace — and space — were once again restored in the homes of the three beatified women.

Do not, however, think that the Floral Club was content. Oh, no! They held onto their dream of having their own dedicated building. By now, with $1200 in the club coffers (a tax levied by the city), the women approached Dale Carnegie, a philanthropist and founder of the Carnegie Steel Company which later became U.S. Steel. A stunningly magnanimous man, Carnegie was giving much of his fortune to establishing libraries throughout America. With little hesitation he agreed to also do so in Austin — if, that is, the city provided the site and maintenance for the building. Austin did. (That original site is now a parking lot behind the Methodist Church on the corner of First Street and Second Avenue Northwest.)

In 1904, 35 years after Esther Morse hatched her initial idea, Austin’s Carnegie Public Library was completed. By then Austin had a population of 6,000 and a book collection of 3,500.

For the next 54 years, the library continued to adequately serve the community. Then by 1958, when the populace had grown to over 27,000 and the book stock had reached 42,000, the city fathers realized something needed to be done.

In 1964, at a cost of $210,500, a wrap-around addition was built surrounding the old library building. This, nonetheless, was only a temporary fix for with its three levels and numerous partitions, crooks and crannies — to say nothing of the sparsity of on-site parking — the building once again proved wanting in many ways. A completely new, modern, one-floor library was needed. In 1996 this dream was accomplished when the present library, the one we value so dearly, was completed.

I can’t write this column without reflecting back on what it was like for me, a little kid, to go to the library in the 40s. Under the all-hearing-a-pin-drop ears of Mabel Olson, head librarian, it was a place of deepest reverential solemnity. Mabel surely had a permanently pleated upper lip from her eighteen year tenure of shushing us, for no one — NO ONE! — was allowed to breathe a perceptible sound in “her” library. We, in a skipped heartbeat, would have been escorted out of the library by our ears had we made a barely audible utterance within earshot of Miss Olson.

When checking out books, I tried very hard to see what Mabel Olson looked like (even though I feared her mightily), but I never really got a good close-up look because her desk rose up from the floor like a gigantic royal wooden throne, placing her up too high in the stratosphere for us little children to clearly see. Still I loved Miss Olson in a terrifying sort of way for her library provided me with a constant flow of Nancy Drew books — that roadster-driving, fearless sleuth who I passionately wanted to be. Yes, I worshipped the flawless Nancy even though I thought she could have treated her steady beau, Ned Nickerson, better. And just what, I wanted to know, was so darned almighty bad about giving the poor love-starved guy an occasional peck on the cheek just to show her appreciation for his sacrificial support and protection?

This month Austin’s “new” library is twenty years old. As you enter the building you will see a large medallion embedded into the marble floor. Not surprising, it is a gift from the Ladies Floral Club and a constant reminder of the support the members have continued to give the library for an uninterrupted 147 years. And the good news is that you, too, may become a member. All you have to do is ask! What could be easier — and better — than that?

Peggy Keener of Austin is the author of two books: “Potato In A Rice Bowl” and “Wondahful Mammaries.” Peggy Keener invites readers to share their memories with her by emailing maggiemamm16@gmail.com. Memories shared with Keener may be shared or referenced in subsequent editions of “Full Circle.”