On the Road for Literacy

In the early decades of the twentieth century, public library services were scant across rural America. In October 1939, the Bulletin of the American Library Association reported that public libraries were available to just twenty-six percent of the rural population nationwide. In Hunterdon County, that meant librarians had to get creative to promote literacy. “Before the Hunterdon County Library System established permanent libraries, it founded a book truck service in 1928,” says Marianne Sievers, the senior librarian at the county’s headquarters library in Raritan Township.

The book truck served county residents by changing out books every six weeks to two months in a system of roughly 160 “library stations”: book collections housed in private homes, public stores, churches, schools, grange halls, post offices, town halls, and children’s reformatories, among other locations. By the end of 1928, county librarians made 505 visits and traveled over 5,000 miles to place 31,516 books in dedicated stations for a population of less than 30,000.

Over the decades, the books kept on truckin’, making borrowing easier. The book trucks gave way to green-paneled bookmobiles, which allowed residents to select titles straight from the library-on-wheels. The photo above, likely taken in the 1940s, shows the bookmobile at Fairview School in Kingwood.

“Thruout the 30s and early 40s, the first two bookmobiles traveled the dusty roads of summer and the deep-rutted tracks of winter snow, taking books to numerous stations and branch libraries scattered thruout the county,” wrote Chester F. Piell, a librarian at Hunterdon County Public Library who doubled as a bookmobile driver, in the Hunterdon Republican. In 1951, however, the green-paneled bookmobiles were retired in favor of a bright red walk-in bookmobile.

Today, the nearly century-old legacy continues in Hunterdon County. Although the current bookmobile has been parked since the pandemic, Sievers says the county library system is planning to resume the service soon.