Fryeburg Public Library in a lovely tourist area in Maine near the White Mountains opens bright and early at 8 am, which is nice when you want to get out and active quickly as most locals and visitors seem to do.
It abuts the town graveyard, which could be a nice peaceful, shady place to read on a summer’s day.
They were having a book sale when I arrived, and tables lined the main aisle. A writer’s group was meeting with the librarian, so local history guru and library volunteer Tana Ganley kindly excused herself from the group and showed me around. Tana creates the invaluable cemetery indexes among other things.
Tana Ganley in the Weston Room
I was lucky she was there or I would have missed the John F. Weston Memorial Room, which has a collection of Maine/local area/Fryeburg writers/history titles donated by local Weston Farms (we swim on the Saco near it and kept hearing the splashes of kids just upstream swinging off a rope where the WF meets the river).
And I certainly wouldn’t have connected the Mulford Room -
- with Clarence Mulford, writer of the Hopalong Cassidy books (I wasn’t a huge fan of westerns as a kid). He lived in the area and donated his research materials, writing accoutrements and much more to the library.
It’s a busy little library, which may explain the sign and time limits (yet they still allow visitors on their few internet computers).
And it’s got some nice quirky touches like this wasp’s nest (to the left of the church) -
- and a little reading area -
- outside the children’s room.
It’s a neat little library and suits the town well.
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