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.