Among its latest inductees, the Cowgirl Hall of Fame posthumously honors these intrepid mounted book lovers.
Imagine filling a pair of saddlebags with books and magazines, swinging onto a mule or horse, and riding into the hills of Appalachia to bring reading materials to people who had none. That’s what the packhorse librarians did during the later years of the Great Depression and beyond. Last November, those women — who served between 1936 and 1943 — were posthumously inducted into the National Cowgirl Museum’s Hall of Fame.
Regardless of sometimes-trying weather conditions and tough terrain, the librarians persevered in delivering books to many families and schoolhouses along their route.
The Pack Horse Library Project comprised women who rode through swift-running creeks and up steep hills to deliver reading materials to people in isolated areas, mainly in Kentucky, where illiteracy rates were as high as 35 percent. “They were going into homes and reading to people who were lonesome and helping teach them to read,” says Bethany Dodson, director of research and education at the National Cowgirl Museum & Hall of Fame. “Truly these women did affect not just literacy rates, but the culture of these communities.”
Because schools often did not have enough children’s books to go around, getting something from the librarians to take home to read with the family was cause for excitement.
The women rode their routes at least twice a month, covering 100 to 120 miles at a time and earning $28 for their efforts. They reached almost 100,000 people.
The packhorse librarians not only delivered books throughout remote areas but also read to those who were unable to read themselves. Here, a librarian visits a man with a gunshot wound.
The Cowgirl Hall of Fame
Every year, the National Cowgirl Museum & Hall of Fame adds four or five new honorees whose lives exemplify the courage, resilience, and independence that helped shape the West. The latest class includes the packhorse librarians, saddle bronc rider Kaila Mussell, breakaway roper JJ Hampton, and Ariat co-founder and CEO Beth Cross.
PHOTOGRAPHY: Courtesy of WPA Collection, Archives and Records Management Division, Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives.
