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Hawkins-Holly Lake Ranch, Texas - GAZETTE ARTICLE ONLINE

WOOD COUNTY HISTORY - AS TIME GOES BY

 

Back to Wood County History Homepage

 

 

AS TIME GOES BY

Wood County History

By LOU MALLORY — Chairperson, Wood County Historical Commission

 

The Carnegie Library in Winnsboro   8-20-05

 

Wood County residents today have a public library located either in the community where they live or in a nearby center.

 

This was not always true – Mineola did not open a public library until about 1950 and other in the county opened over the ensuing years.

 

Winnsboro, however, has had a library, a Carnegie Library, since 1909.

 

R.B. Howell was elected mayor of Winnsboro in 1905 and served until April of 1909. At one point during those four years, Howell, with the help of C.H. Morris, president of First National Bank in Winnsboro, got in touch with the Carnegie Foundation.

 

Howell and Morris must have been very persuasive because the Foundation made a donation of $10,000 to the city for building a public library. The land purchased was on the west corner just across from the railroad tracks as you enter Winnsboro going north. Construction was started in the early weeks of 1909.

 

The city of Winnsboro had considerable trouble getting the Carnegie Foundation to approve the building as constructed because the city planned to use the lower story for an opera house.

 

The Foundation insisted that the new building should be used only for educational purposes. After considerable discussion, the city finally convinced the Foundation that the only operas which would be performed would be of an educational nature and that it would not be a general opera house.

 

In April of 1909, Will D. Suiter was elected mayor and he asked Howell and the ladies’ organization of the city to prepare the library building for opening. The library was equipped – shelves were built and books were obtained. For the opera house on the lower floor, secondhand opera seats were purchased and a secondhand piano. The piano was bought from a man in Sulphur Springs who had closed out his opera business. The ladies’ organizations succeeded in raising enough money to purchase curtains and fix up the lower floors as an opera hall.

 

For the next few years this was the only opera house in Winnsboro. At that particular time there was no motion picture theater operating in Winnsboro.

 

Mrs. Virgin Bozeman was appointed librarian in 1909 and remained in that position until 1951 when her health began to fail and she resigned.

 

At the time, Winnsboro was said to have the best public library of any town its size in northeast Texas.

 

In the 1980s, the library had outgrown its facilities and the new Gilbreath Memorial Library was built north of downtown. This beautiful library today houses a much expanded inventory of volumes, plus a computer room and a large children’s area complete with a life-size train.

 

All the libraries in Wood County offers books, computers and most have a large selection of local, national, and world history book and other publications. Most also have a genealogy section for all those who are engaged in researching their family roots. 

 

 

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