Twenty years ago, Jennifer Davies was eight months pregnant when she, with the help of a small team including then Clarendon mayor Jack Lang and Shawville mayor Albert Amrstrong, moved the Shawville-Clarendon Library from its former location in the basement of the Shawville town hall to its current home in the red brick building next door.
It wasn’t Davies’ first time moving a library – every other library she had worked at until taking the job as head librarian in Shawville in Dec. 2003 had had to move – but it was her first time doing it as head librarian.
So she used her trusted system: boxing books depending on what shelf they found themselves on, and reshelving them with their same neighbours in their new location.
“It was just next door so you couldn’t really load them in the back of a truck, so we were just hand-carting books just down the street,” Davies told THE EQUITY on Friday morning.
Ground had been broken for the new library building in the . . .
fall of 2003, and in June 2004, less than a year later, it opened its doors to the public.
“We had our grand opening and then I was put on modified bed rest,” Davies laughed. “I always tell everyone this: ‘Don’t move a library when eight months pregnant.’”
This month the Shawville-Clarendon library is celebrating 20 years since it pulled itself out from that basement and began its new and improved life next door.
Current head librarian Heather Sly and assistant librarian Ruth Potter, with support from Shawville and Clarendon municipalities, have organized a series of opportunities to celebrate this moment.
On Saturday the library hosted the first of these events. The community was invited to meet local authors Esther Colpitts, Luke Murphy and Robert Brown, all of whom have published at least one book, if not several.
“We were keeping it very informal, and trying to make it very approachable,” explained Potter. “We decided to bring in authors because maybe some don’t even know there are authors in the community.”
Local author Muriel Davies and illustrator Tina Michaud also stopped by the library for the event.
This coming Saturday (July 20) the library has organized a bus tour of Clarendon, to be guided by local historian Jo-Anne Brownlee who will bring riders through the history of the municipality. The tour was first designed by Brownlee in 2005.
Potter said those who would like to join the tour should register at the library in advance as the bus is filling up.
Finally, the library is now accepting entries for a series of draws for six prizes donated by the Biblio network, of which the library is a member. The draws will take place during the Shawville Fair.
Potter has taken the opportunity of the anniversary to dig into the history of the library.
“The library file in the [Pontiac] Archives is really skinny, so my goal is to fatten it up,” she said.
So far, by way of word of mouth and the historical documents she has found, she’s learned the library was created with a bylaw in 1968 and first lived in a building that became Shawville’s fire hall, at the time home to the town hall.
In 1972, the municipality moved into the old post office building on Main Street, where it is still located, and the library moved with it.
In 1979, the library expanded into the basement of that building, and even got its own door, but as it was not accessible to people in wheelchairs, Shawville and Clarendon municipalities realized it would need to move again.
Davies said its final move into its current building in 2004 made it accessible to the community in a way it hadn’t been before.
“There were a lot more people who were coming in,” she recalled.
“You know, build it and they will come. Good libraries are a cornerstone for the community.”
