East Branch Library
The East Branch Library is a Branch library in Lexington, Massachusetts that was flooded in August 2007. Since then, despite numerous pleas from patrons of the East Lexington Branch, it has not been repaired, or reopened. The Lexington for Libraries committee was formed in September, by Geneva Kropper, a concerned patron of the library, to try to alert Lexington citizens to the plight of the library. To sign a petition to keep the East Branch Library open, go to www.ipetitions.com/petition/ELBL. To join the Lexington4Libraries Association, go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SavetheELBL.
East Branch's History
The East Lexington Branch Library has its home in the Stone Building, a Registered National Historic Landmark
The building was a center of civic life in East Lexington when it was built in 1834; it was designed as a meeting hall: a place where "lectures, sermons and other meetings could be held, and where freedom of speech could be allowed." East Lexington citizens wanted their own gathering place to discuss such controversial issues as Abolition and the Temperance movement. In the years to come, the Stone Building would attract such notable speakers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, and Josiah Quincy, Jr. Architecturally, the Stone Building was an experiment in a fashionable new style of the era: Greek Revival. Designed by architect Isaac Melvin and built by Eli Robbins, the meeting hall's design was drawn from Asher Benjamin's now-famous plan book The Practice of Architecture. The Stone Building was Robbins' first project; he would go on to have a successful career in and around Lexington.
It was Robbins' granddaughter, Miss Ellen Stone, who offered Lexington the Stone Building in 1891. In accordance with her mother's wishes, Miss Stone sold the building to the town for a token sum; her mother had stipulated that the building was to remain a meeting hall or a library.
At this time, the East Lexington Branch Library was ready for a home of its own. The Branch Library had opened in the old Adams School in 1883, and had since moved next door to a room above Holbrook's General Store. Miss Nellie Holbrook, the Branch's first librarian, carried books to and from the Main Library and kept the reading room open "at convenient hours six days of the week." Ten years after moving into the Stone Building, the new Branch Library boasted 2,000 volumes of its own.
Today, the Branch has over 15,000 items: books, periodicals, videocassettes, audio books, and electronic resources. Although the old meeting hall now houses materials and technology its builders could never have imagined, it still retains its nineteenth-century character.
From http://www.carylibrary.org/eastbranch/history.html
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