Description: Nell Thornton famously said, in her book, The Traditions and Records of Southwest Harbor, “The Southwest Harbor Public Library had its beginning [as the Tremont Public Library] in 1884 when Mrs. Annie Sawyer Downs gathered a number of discarded books from the hotels, mostly paper covered volumes, and placed them on a shelf in one corner of Dr. R. J. Lemont's drug store…” The library was, as were many small libraries on the coast of Maine, started by “people from away,” in other words, summer people. This small library, however, was quickly adopted by native Southwest Harborians, and has grown, in the almost one and a half centuries since its founding, to be one of Maine’s very few five-star libraries, according to the Library Journal Index of Public Library Service. Thornton, Nellie C., Traditions and records of Southwest Harbor and Somesville, Mount Desert Island, Maine (Merrill & Webber Company, 1938, The Southwest Harbor Public Library, 1988) [show more]
Description: "... it was 1955 before the library built its second addition. This was a room for the youngest children done in memory of Grace Simmons, who had rebound countless worn library books for the library."
Description: In 1955, Walter Cabot Paine gave funds to the Southwest Harbor Public Library for the Francis Hamabe murals in the newly refurbished Children’s Room. Shows the Children's Room before the 1984 remodelling with the Francis Hamabe mural, painted in 1955.
Description: This photograph looks north and shows the library and Allen’s store beyond it on the left. To the right can be seen the Gilley house, the Harmon Block and a corner of the Park Theatre. The fire destroyed the Carroll building, the Holmes store, the Holmes Hotel (space at the left foreground) and the Odd Fellows building, which was rebuilt on its lot across the street.