Circulating Books on the Back Roads of Vermont

“The one-room school in Stan­nard was a dark build­ing,” 91-year-old Eleanor Bon­ney Simons (known as Bon­ney) remem­bers. “The win­dows were reg­u­lar house win­dows, not the large ones you would see in typ­i­cal schools at the time. I thought, ‘How hor­ri­ble for these chil­dren to have to attend a school like this.’”

As she entered the build­ing, she noticed a man in the back of the room, kneel­ing there to help some child. When he stood up, he came for­ward with his hand out and intro­duced him­self as Super­in­ten­dent of Schools, John Hold­en. Lat­er, he became Vermont’s Com­mis­sion­er of Education.

Accord­ing to Bon­ney, that event changed her atti­tude. “I under­stood that these chil­dren could be as well-served in a one-room school as any oth­er. Like today, it all depends on the qual­i­ty of instruction.” 

For young Eleanor Bon­ney, fresh out of Sim­mons Library School in 1941, mov­ing to Ver­mont to become Region­al Librar­i­an in St. Johns­bury was like going back a cen­tu­ry. “Pot-bel­lied stoves and a teacher who had to do everything–all eight grades in one room!” she exclaims, obvi­ous­ly still impressed with the dif­fi­cul­ty those brave teach­ers faced.

The Region­al Library sys­tem came into exis­tence as a response to the Great Depres­sion, which had tak­en its toll on Ver­mont libraries. With finan­cial sup­port reduced, a State Free Library Com­mis­sion came up with a plan to set up a sys­tem of five regions that would cir­cu­late books through­out the state, both to schools and pub­lic libraries. Book­wag­ons would deliv­er the books, con­sis­tent­ly exchang­ing col­lec­tions to get the most use out of each book. It was a bril­liant plan that would serve Ver­mon­ters well. 

When she inter­viewed for the job in Mont­pe­lier in the spring of 1941, she remem­bers being asked, “Have you ever dri­ven in snow?” 

“Once,” was her reply. She had just got­ten her driver’s license. 

Mrs. Wells, the governor’s wife, and O.D. Math­ew­son, a promi­nent Lyn­don Cen­ter edu­ca­tor and founder of Lyn­don State Col­lege, who had spon­sored the bill to set up the region­al sys­tem, were on the board who inter­viewed Bon­ney. She remem­bers Math­ew­son say­ing dur­ing the inter­view, “the rea­son Ver­mon­ters get so much done is they have to get up before break­fast.” No doubt, that com­ment meant that if she got the job, it wasn’t going to be easy.

Young and unfazed, Bon­ney was hired and served in that posi­tion from 1941 to 1947. She moved to St. Johns­bury, find­ing an apart­ment down the street from the Athenaeum where the region­al col­lec­tion was housed on the upper floor. The Athenaeum librar­i­an at that time was Cor­nelia Fair­banks, the last of the Fair­banks fam­i­ly in St. Johns­bury. “She was a very mild woman, polite,” remem­bers Bon­ney. “At the time, Cor­nelia still used record writ­ing, even though she had a type­writer.“  In school, Bon­ney had learned this type of writ­ing, but she had also had a course in typ­ing. “I think the Athenaeum still has some of Cornelia’s cat­a­loging cards.” 

It was the end of the depres­sion when she start­ed and before WWII, and she was lucky to have two local men who were employed by the WPA to go with her on those ear­ly trips as dri­vers. They were Fran­cis Mayo from St. Johns­bury and Lee Blan­chard from Gro­ton. The book­wag­on team was set up with a new Ply­mouth, a small pan­el truck that had a big lazy Susan shelf in the back that held 600 books. “We’d go out about 15 days a month. The rest would be work­ing on the col­lec­tion back at the library,” said Bonney. 

Lunch was on the road in the book­wag­on. Bon­ney ate from a met­al lunch pail that her land­la­dy packed for her. “The state paid on-the-road costs,” said Bon­ney, “50 cents for break­fast.” Bon­ney and her dri­vers vis­it­ed 53 towns, which includ­ed towns in Essex, Orleans, Cale­do­nia , Orange and Wash­ing­ton counties.

Most of the dri­ving was on dirt roads. “No mat­ter what the weath­er, if we planned to go out, we went,” she said. Of course, there were times when they bogged down, either in snow or mud. She remem­bers “bury­ing it where Steve Park­er now lives on the Old North Church road to Tampi­co one Sep­tem­ber. An old man came with his horse. Mr. Blan­chard pushed from behind, and the man asked, ‘Can you team it?’ I guessed that meant ‘Can you dri­ve it?’ I nod­ded and slipped behind the wheel to help guide the car out of the mud.” There were many such events on the back roads of her routes.

She fond­ly remem­bers her WPA men. “Mr. Mayo was an avid read­er, and I relied on him heav­i­ly.” Peo­ple would gath­er around the books in the wag­on and pep­per her with ques­tions about the titles. “I hadn’t read most of them, but Mr. Mayo would help me through. A cus­tomer want­ed to know if the book they were tak­ing out was any good, and he had read most of them.”

“Mr. Blan­chard loved it when we went to Gro­ton. He used to own a store there. He would go into the school and announce, ‘I bet I can name every fam­i­ly rep­re­sent­ed here just by look­ing at your faces.’ And he would do it; the kids would be so pleased.” She also remem­bers that as they drove along the roads, he would count and announce how many head of cat­tle were in each field along the way.

Her dri­vers helped her through that first year, but when war was declared in 1942, the WPA was dis­band­ed. There were plen­ty of good pay­ing jobs to be had in sup­port of the war effort. Not only did her WPA men dis­ap­pear, but so did many teach­ers. “They were mak­ing a pit­tance as teach­ers but could go out and work in fac­to­ries and make good money.”With her dri­vers gone, Bon­ney went it alone or with Isabelle Sar­gent, a St. Johns­bury girl that grad­u­at­ed from the Acad­e­my. “We had to cut back on some of the runs because of the gas coupons,” she said. 

She most enjoyed going to the schools. “If a teacher was orga­nized and cre­ative, the kids had a good edu­ca­tion.” As a ster­ling exam­ple, she men­tioned Dorothy Stan­ton, who taught at the Tampi­co in North Danville. “The thing I noticed most about her room was that every time I came, the chairs were often put in a dif­fer­ent set­ting. There was a feel­ing that the stu­dents were always busy, involved in some project they were work­ing on.”

There were schools that were not so for­tu­nate, par­tic­u­lar­ly dur­ing the war years when some schools were led by sub­sti­tutes due to the teacher short­age. She remem­bers dri­ving into one one-room school­yard and see­ing a boy jump­ing out the win­dow. The sub­sti­tute there told her, “These kids can’t read; they just stum­ble along.” The worse such sto­ry she remem­bers was when a Super­in­ten­dent came to vis­it one school, sit­ting among the stu­dents par­tic­i­pate in the les­son. “You don’t need to expect any­thing,” said the sub­sti­tute. “I’m just keep­ing the door open.” The teacher short­age was the turn­ing point for the numer­ous one and two-room schools as con­sol­i­da­tion became more prominent.

“I liked going to schools the most, because of the inter­ac­tion,” said Bon­ney. “When I went to pub­lic libraries, it was most­ly to help with book clas­si­fi­ca­tion and weed­ing.” A librar­i­an weeds a col­lec­tion when there are too many books on the shelves, but weed­ing may or may not be seen as a good thing by the local librar­i­an. “I went to the Bar­ton library to weed. It was a nice build­ing, but books were piled high, even stacked on the win­dowsills. I don’t know how many box­es were filled that day from the col­lec­tion as I worked my way through it. I heard lat­er that the librar­i­an came in the next morn­ing, sat at the desk and cried all day. I don’t know if she put them all back on the shelves or not.”

“Some­times I was asked to go to indi­vid­ual hous­es to deliv­er books, and I would do that, too. I remem­ber Mr. Miller in East Top­sham, who ran the famous Miller’s store there. He want­ed books about the Phillip­ines, because that was where his son was locat­ed in the war. A cus­tomer came in the door and asked if he served cof­fee. ‘Hell, no,’ Miller respond­ed. ‘I don’t deal in antiques.’ There was no cof­fee, because of the war,” Bon­ney said in explanation. 

When the war end­ed, Bon­ney was in for a life change, too. Before the war she had been intro­duced to a young fire­man when he came to douse a fire in the Athenaeum chim­ney. Evi­dent­ly, anoth­er type of fire had been lit at the same time. When he returned from the war, he returned to his job at the fire sta­tion and began to find ways to engage the beau­ti­ful Bon­ney in con­ver­sa­tion. One day, he saun­tered by to ask if she had any good books to read. “Oh, can you read?” was her reply.

They were mar­ried in 1947, and she quit her full­time job as Region­al Librar­i­an. “He want­ed me to,” she said. “It would have been a poor reflec­tion on him if I had to work. Those were just the val­ues of the times.” He went on to become St. Johnsbury’s fire chief for ten years; Bon­ney worked part time for the new Region­al Libar­ian, Mary Stew­art and her assis­tant, Les Smith, who would become the well-known area book­mo­bile man.

Michael Roche, our present Region­al Librar­i­an, shared the fol­low­ing inter­est­ing sta­tis­tics about Eleanor Bon­ney Simons’ last year on the job: the St. Johns­bury book­wag­on trav­elled 14,385 miles on 136 work­ing days, aver­ag­ing 105 miles a day, rain or shine. She deliv­ered to over 100 schools, 58 pub­lic libraries, 35 indi­vid­ual stops, 20 sta­tions and 14 pri­vate homes for a total of 1,153 stops.

For more pho­tos relat­ed to this sto­ry, click here.

This arti­cle was first pub­lished in the Octo­ber 2010, issue of the North Star Month­ly.