Lafayette History

Lafayette, the new town on the Miller Farm, was platted last Monday. Simpson & Son have the engine set up at the new mine, and are pushing the development of the same and other matters concerning the welfare of the new camp at the best of their ability. We are looking every day for the Union Pacific company to start work on a branch track from here to that new Eldorado.

The second box in the State Traveling Library will leave tomorrow for Lafayette to remain for three months. It will go in charge of Mrs. Mary E. Miller, an old and well-known resident of that locality, who will be responsible for its contents, and will arrange a reading room to be used during its stay. This is the box given by the Young Ladies’ Club [of the Congregational Church in Denver].

As the books presented by the club are almost entirely fiction, some of them have been laid aside for other boxes, and some juveniles and solid reading substituted. The contents of the box are now as follows: “Quo Vadis,” “Shirley,” “Pendennis,” “Dred,” “In His Steps,” Sheldon; “Plain Tales from the Hills,” “The Face and the Mask,” Barr; “Mosses From an Old Manse,” “What Might Have Been Expected,” Stockton; “Imperial Democracy,” Jordan; “Social Evolution,” Kidd; “Last of the Mohicans,” “Robinson Crusoe,” “Bessie and Raymond,” “Leslie Goldthwaite,” Whitney; “Deerslayer,” “Scottish Chiefs,” “Alice in Wonderland,” “Swiss Family Robinson,” “Bondman,” Caine; “Miss Gilbert’s Career,” Hollaway; “Vicar of Wakefield,” “Adam Bede,” “Mill on the Floss,” “Romance of Two Worlds,” “Three Men in a Boat,” Jerome; “Last of the Barons,” Butwer; “Window in Thurms,” Barrie; “Trilby,” “David Copperfield,” “Dickens’ Poems,” “Life of General Marion,” “Emerson’s Essays,” “Life of David Crockett,” “Biographies of Great Men,” “Temple Talks,” Myron Reed; “Queen of the Air,” Ruskin; “Count Silvius,” Horn; “Europe in the 19th Century,” Hudson; “David Harum,” “Women and Economies,” “Oom Paul and His People,” “The Workers,” (West) Wyckoff; “Equality,” Bellamy; “Social Spirit in America,” Henderson; “Story of Electricity,” Munroe; “Co-Operative Commonwealths,” Gronlund; “A Blockaded Family.” A list of those donating books was published in last Sunday’s [Rocky Mountain] News.

Continue reading “Reprints: 1900 – Mary Miller’s reading room hosts traveling library”

The Lafayette Public Library’s history and origin traces back to town founder Mary Miller, who established a reading room in Lafayette sometime between 1888 and 1891. The town’s public library — a place where anyone could take a book off the shelf and read it at home, then bring it back — started in Lafayette in 1923.

Continue reading “Lafayette Public Library history rooted in 1890s public reading rooms”