Between 1920 and 1925, thousands of gold seekers flooded into the area, most of them needing food, accommodations, supplies, and many of them looking for all the vices to be found in a gold rush town.
By 1928, this “second Cariboo gold rush” had subsided, and the town had settled down into a quiet little village of about 500 people, largely dependent upon ranching, lumbering, a little tourism, and some nearby gold mining operations. Back in those days, reading and literacy were seen as desirable, but not always attainable skills.
Children attended school when it was practical to do so, but the weather, planting, harvest, chores, and family duties meant that this attendance was often interrupted.
Recreational reading was a fairly rare activity for children as well as their parents. Most families were just too busy trying to eke out a living, and few possessed books except for bibles, the occasional classic novel, or collections of poetry passed down from previous generations.
Schools had textbooks and readers for the various grade levels, and some teachers brought their own books with them and would sometimes lend them out.
However, except for letters of personal correspondence and the community newspaper, the general population did not put a very high priority on reading.
Generally speaking, this attitude towards reading continued through the 1920s. Then came the 1930s, a difficult economic time with a country-wide depression. People had to focus on day-to-day existence, and nobody had extra money to purchase books or magazines. In schools, however, attendance was becoming more regular and literacy was being emphasized, so gradually, reading levels were improving and literacy within the population was being increased.
The first half of the 1940s saw the country focused on World War II. As Canada broke out of the Depression and the economy geared up for the war effort, a completely different attitude towards education in general, and to reading and writing in particular, emerged.
No longer were they viewed unimportant, rather, they were seen as skills that people must have in order to get ahead. By the end of the war, this new focus on literacy skills had also shifted peoples’ attitudes about reading for pleasure.
In 1945, during these changing times, Joe Phillipson was the principal and head teacher at the Williams Lake High School.
He was both a dedicated teacher and an effective administrator, later going on to become the Deputy Minister of Education for the Province of B.C., Joe saw a real need in the town for a community public library and he set about on a campaign to get one. He was a very persuasive man, and he was instrumental in convincing a majority of the townspeople to support this project.
He formed a group to advocate and fundraise for the cause and he even talked the Village Board of Commissionaires (the town council) to donate the hefty sum of $100 towards it. Thus it was that in the spring of 1946, the library opened with some 250 books available for circulation.
For its first 10 years, the library had no permanent home. It was located in a series of venues, starting out in the annex at the old Williams Lake Superior School, located right about where the current library is today. When that area was needed for students, it was moved to a donated space in the rear of a radio repair shop, and by 1952, it had been moved again to a small room in the basement of St. Peter’s Anglican Church.
All the while, its popularity and circulation kept increasing, as did the number of volumes in the collection. Since its beginning, the library was run entirely by volunteers who donated uncounted hours of time to purchase, catalogue, mend and distribute the books as well as to provide assistance and programs, such as the story-telling time for tots, which began in 1953.
The library was solidly supported by the community in those early years. There were bakes sales, tag days, book drives, and funding appeals to supplement the yearly grants totalling $500.00 that came from the village and the provincial government. One book drive in 1954 involved all the school children in town, going door to door requesting donations, and netting over 1,000 volumes.
In 1955, the church needed the room, and the library was given notice. That’s when it was decided to construct a building that would be solely dedicated to being a library. A committee was formed and they borrowed $1,500 to purchase building materials.
The village donated some land where the present cenotaph now stands, and through some private donations, a manufactured log building was purchased. The whole town seemed to become involved in the build. The Kiwanis Club spearheaded the actual construction, assisted by local building contractors and businessmen.
The heating system was donated, as were the drapes and shelves, and tradesmen volunteered their time. The students at the elementary school raised money to purchase chairs and tables and the Boy Scouts purchased the flooring tiles through the proceeds from hot dog sales. It was truly a community effort, demonstrating how important the library had become to the town.
In 1958, there was still an outstanding debt of about $1,500 remaining from the construction. That May a huge wrestling show was planned to raise money towards the retirement of this debt. The featured performers were Felix and Bill Kohnke, well-known local businessmen and part-time professional wrestlers.
The Elks Hall was jam-packed for the event. Library board members and staff volunteers took money at the door, ushered people to their seats, set up the hall and cleaned up afterwards, and gave away door prizes (some were used books). After all was said and done, the event had raised over $1,200, almost eliminating the debt.
Williams Lake took a great deal of perverse pride in knowing that in all likelihood, no other library in the country had raised money by sponsoring a wrestling show.
That library building served the town well until late 1967, when its size and location became problematic.
In 1958, the circulation was 7,100 volumes, but less than 10 years later, it had reached 25,000.
The place was just too small, and the town council had plans to construct a new building to replace the old Cariboo Memorial Hospital, which it was using as its city hall. The engineered log library building was dismantled by Nestor Johnson and relocated to Scout Island, where it was repurposed as a caretaker’s residence. Since then, it has been upgraded and refurbished, but it still serves today as the living quarters for the caretaker of the Scout Island Nature Centre.
Once again, the library was without a home, so, as an interim measure, it was moved into the old hospital complex, occupying what had once been the hospital’s maternity ward. At about this time, the town negotiated an agreement with the Thompson-Nicola Library System to fund, staff, and operate our library.
When the Bank of Montreal moved to its new space in the Hodgson Place Mall in 1975, its former building on the corner of First Avenue and Oliver Street was purchased by the renamed Cariboo-Thompson-Nicola Library System. Late in 1975, the library moved locations once again, although this time it remained in place for more than 20 years.
Lil Mack, who was the area librarian in the early 1980s remembers the building well. It had lots of space for the shelves and for people to work.
The archives were kept in the old bank vault, and the rooms upstairs meant that there was never a shortage of meeting areas. During the 80s and 90s, the library continued to be well-used and well-supported by the community, and the number of volumes and the programs offered increased.
In the mid-1990s, a push developed to make the library a regional distribution hub for branch libraries in the smaller Cariboo centres. Ray Woods, who became mayor in 1996 and who served as a long time representative on the Cariboo Regional District (CRD) was a prime mover of this initiative. Largely because of his efforts, in 1998, the CRD formed its own library system, an integrated network providing services through 15 community libraries.
Later that year, this system replaced the Cariboo Thompson Nicola system and in late October, 1999, the library moved to its present location on Third Avenue, into a building which had once been an Overwaitea store, then a BC Liquor Store, but which had been refurbished to become the CRD offices and library complex.
Today, the CRD Library System, which is connected to libraries throughout the province, has over 240,000 items in its collection, as well as over 3,000 DVDs, more than 2,000 music CDs, and access to over 25 computer databases. It adds more than 15,000 items to its collection each year, and in 2020, it lent out more than 420,000 individual items - a far cry from the 250 books donated and purchased by the town’s residents in 1945.
Information for this column came from the internet, from the writings of Irene Stangoe, and from the CRD. My thanks also to Lil Mack, Anna Roberts, Walt Cobb and Fred McMechan for their recollections.
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